The Unwinding of the Carry Trade Has Finally Hit Currencies

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Why has the yen strengthened so much this week, even though the Japanese stock market has plummeted?  The financial media have largely got this one right:   the answer is unwinding of the carry trade, and the associated flight to quality, which means flight to yen and dollar (cash and treasury bills).

 

This was to be expected.  It is an unseemly tooting of ones’ own horn, but — earlier this year I wrote in an article in the Milken Institute Review (vol. 10, no. 1, pages 38-45)

“The traditional pattern is most clear with the carry from the yen to the euro:  it has been predictably profitable for the last five years, and this will predictably end soon, as the yen reverses its depreciation against the euro.” read more

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Restructuring the International Financial System: A New Bretton Woods?

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The members of the G-20 are meeting in Washington on November 15 to discuss reform of the global financial system.  The first thing to say about the calls for a “new Bretton Woods” is that they overreach, in the sense that it is very unlikely that any changes in the structure of the international monetary or financial system will or should, at this point in history, come out of multilateral discussions that are big enough to merit comparison with the first Bretton Woods. Certainly we are not talking about fixing exchange rates, as the 1944 meeting did. read more

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The Best-Predicted Event in Economics in 35 Years: Paul Krugman’s Nobel Prize

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I wish to add my heart-felt approval to many others, regarding the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economics to Paul Krugman.  For those readers of the New York Times who can only think of him as a columnist, let me assure you that long before he ever wrote a newspaper opinion piece, Krugman had become the leading international economist of my generation.  I leave it to others to explain the trade theory research that earned the ultimate accolade.  I will only say that (together with Elhanan Helpman) Krugman took traditional trade theory – which ever since David Ricardo had assumed perfect competition, constant returns to scale, and unchanging technology – and made it more realistic by assuming imperfect competition, increasing returns to scale, and endogenous technology.   read more

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