WASHINGTON, Oct. 10 (UPI) -- The global economy is under new management, if those somewhat battered institutions the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund may be said to play such a managerial role.
Certainly nobody else is doing the job. The Group of Seven finance ministers’ meetings hardly qualify. So long as they exclude the finance ministers of key emerging markets like China, India and Brazil, they are running the economy of the old West at a time when economic growth is now being delivered predominantly by new players. China alone is now responsible for half the growth in global gross domestic product.
Nor do the big central bankers qualify as global financial managers. They may have consulted somewhat during the latest flurries in the debt markets, but they did not coordinate, and the policies of the U.S. Fed, the European Central Bank, and the banks of England and Japan were palpably not aligned.
And with the ECB now fretting over the dollar’s fall against the euro almost as loudly as the French government, the interests of the world’s two biggest central banks are diametrically opposed. Europe’s export-led recovery is at dire risk from the euro’s rise, while the U.S. economy’s main hope is that the plunge in the dollar is producing a boom for U.S. exports that are now so much cheaper.
This is all very different from the 1980s, when the Europeans, Japanese and Americans, finance ministers and central bankers, were able to work closely together to fix the global financial crisis. The Louvre and Plaza agreements they reached carefully managed an orderly and controlled fall of the overvalued dollar to about half its previous value. That, sadly, could not happen in any such controlled fashion today; not, at least, without some changes of national policies and structural reforms.
So if the central bankers and the G7 are no longer doing the job, that leaves Robert Zoellick, new head of the World Bank, and former French Finance Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn of the IMF to redraft the architecture of the creaking global financial system.
Each man has put forward some interesting ideas. When he took over as new managing director of the IMF, Strauss-Kahn said he wanted the organization to change to reflect “the new balance of power in the world” with a greater role for China, India and other emerging economies.
"The institution (the IMF) is priceless," he said. "I believe it because, in globalization, we don't need less multilateralism, we need more multilateralism. We don't need less IMF, we need more IMF.”
One priority, he stressed, would be for the IMF to take up the issue of China’s undervalued currency, which has provoked legislation in the U.S. Congress that would impose sweeping tariffs on Chinese exports unless the currency is allowed to appreciate sharply.
"It's in nobody's interest to let this debate grow sour" between China and the United States, Strauss-Kahn said, adding the threat of a creeping return of trade protection was serious and troubling.
At the World Bank, Zoellick has moved quickly to repair the damage to the institution caused by the unhappy experience of his predecessor, Paul Wolfowitz. Zoellick is meeting daily with the bank’s top 20 officials, who complained of being sidelined under Wolfowitz, and he has cleverly managed to placate most of the big constituencies. Advocates who want the Bank to focus on helping the very poorest countries have been pleased by his skill at getting the rich nations to pledge $30 billion in new money for the International Development Association, which focuses on the 80 poorest countries.
Realists are delighted that Zoellick intends to continue being a major player in funding countries that can already raise money on the open markets. The Bank needs to stay involved in China and India, he insists, so that it can continue to influence their economic policies.
A key test will be Zoellick’s role as a convinced free trader who as U.S. trade representative successfully launched the Doha Round of world trade talks in 2001, in helping to cajole India and Brazil to make concessions required to bring the Doha Round to a successful conclusion and to head off the worrying drift to economic nationalism and protection. He has the credibility for the task and is an old friend of the current head of the World Trade Organization, his fellow marathon runner Pascal Lamy.
The World Bank and IMF meetings in Washington on the weekend of Oct. 20-21, which will be joined by a meeting of G7 finance ministers to be hosted by the U.S. Treasury, offers a rare opportunity for a kind of global financial summit that could hardly be better timed.
“The roof is starting to collapse on the global housing bubble, as housing markets begin to freeze up not only in the United States, but also in many other countries, such as high-flying Spain,” notes the IMF’s former chief economist, now Harvard professor, Ken Rogoff.
“Money markets, especially in Europe, remain traumatized by the festering global credit crunch,” Rogoff says. “Record-high food and energy prices, combined with sharply rising wages in China, are pushing up inflation in much of the world. Last, but not least, the U.S. productivity boom is decelerating.”
None of this bodes well for the future, with the growing prospect of a long slowdown if not recession in the U.S. economy threatening to tighten the U.S. consumer demand on which China and other emerging economies have long depended. And now the IMF has downgraded its estimates of the growth prospects for Europe and Japan. This may not be the best of times for the globe’s financial elites to reform the crumbling system, but it better be done.
