In Episode 54 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with economic historian Barry Eichengreen about his experience studying currency pegs and exchange rate mechanisms, as the two explore how the legacy of globalization, trade liberalization, and the great moderation laid the foundation for the challenges facing the modern economy.
Barry Eichengreen has made a career of studying the history of money and the role that currency has played in the international order. Currency regimes are not fixed in stone. Our current system of floating exchange rates backed by the petrodollar has only been with for the last forty years. Before it, the Western world existed on the gold exchange rate mechanism of Bretton Woods, which lasted for less than thirty years, and whose dissolution lead to a period of high inflation and unemployment that challenged the economic models of the time and put the American economy and political establishment through a decade of frustration, uncertainty, and unrest.
However, In the years after the stagflation of the 1970’s and the deregulation of the 1980’s, a period of moderation swept across the Western World. The cost of capital declined, as inflation steadied and markets rose. Developing economies hitched their wagons to the industrialized West, pegging their currencies to the US Dollar, which was seen as the coinage of a New World Order. The Euro project, once a gradual process of integration, was fast-tracked under Maastricht and the reunification of the German Reich. Communist China, humbled by the fall of the Soviet Union and motivated by the riots in Tiananmen Square, set itself down the path towards becoming the growth engine of a new sort of global economy. At the time, many adopted Francis Fukuyama’s phrase, “the End of History,” to describe this period of optimism in the establishment of a neoliberal world order that they hoped would last for the rest of time.
Alas, the grand ambitions and lofty ideals of the Washington consensus proved premature. The rush of capital from Western countries into Eastern ones precipitated a series of financial crises beginning in Asia, and ending on the balance sheets of America’s legendary financial institutions, leading to a government-engineered bailout of the country’s investment banks. Eventually, the high-flying stock market of the late 90’s popped in spectacular fashion, and thus began a series of monetary countermeasures, rate cuts, and wealth effects that would lead, inexorably, towards the Great Financial Crisis, a watershed moment in the history of markets whose consequences we have yet to fully reckon with to this very day.
Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou
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