The Globe's Konrad Yakabuski succumbs to the monetary union zombie

And so it continues. I noted on Wednesday that the Globe and Mail's lead editorial on exchange rate policy demonstrated a singular lack of understanding of the economics of exchange rate policy. A particularly astute commenter noted that it was only a question of time before the zombie notion of monetary union started lumbering across the political landscape in search of brains, and it would appear that the Globe's Konrad Yakabuski has succumbed, in the form of a long essay in the Saturday edition.

I don't have a shotgun, so I'll just fisk it:

Every institution has its orthodoxies. These are the mostly unwritten rules that no one from within challenges without risking marginalization or outright ostracism. To be a member of the club is to acquiesce.

At the Bank of Canada, arguably the most important player in the Canadian economy, there is only one orthodoxy more inviolate than inflation targeting – though this has been the central bank's only official objective since 1991. No, besides keeping the annual inflation rate between 1 per cent and 3 per cent, those who toil in the glass house that is the bank's Ottawa headquarters accept as holy creed the existence of a separate Canadian currency.

Oh, please. These two paragraphs are self-serving boilerplate: "How brave I am to challenge orthodoxy!"

This goes far beyond any desire among bank staff to preserve their own jobs.

You stay classy, Konrad! Attributing base motives to those who argue against your position is the path to hackdom. But as it happens, Bank staff have nothing to worry about. The people who should be worried are Bay Street economists and Globe and Mail editorial writers; their jobs might be taken by people who know what they're talking about.

It is partly the result of a cultural bias, since Canada was the first major country to adopt a floating exchange rate in 1950 and, except for eight years after 1962 when the loonie was pegged to the U.S. dollar, our currency has navigated countless peaks and valleys, to the delight and horror of cross-border shoppers, snowbirds, manufacturers and speculators. Managing monetary policy in a floating-rate regime is what the Bank of Canada knows best.

Mr Yakabuski would do well to read this or this for the background behind the Bank's decision to float the CAD. The Bank of Canada knows how to conduct a fixed exchange rate regime - it's not a particularly demanding task. It chooses not to.

It is also what the bank's well regarded research staff believes to be in the best interest of the Canadian economy. By letting its dollar float, the bank reasons, Canada can adjust more quickly and effectively to domestic and global economic shocks than it could if we implemented a fixed exchange rate, embraced a common North American currency or simply adopted the U.S. dollar as this country's legal tender.

Hey! It's not a holy creed after all! It's the conclusion of the work of generations of talented researchers! Maybe you should rewrite those first two paragraphs!

The central bank believes that the Canadian and U.S. economies are just too different to warrant a single currency and monetary policy. We're net exporters of natural resources; they're net importers of the Earth's God-given abundances. Hence, when commodity prices crater – as they did during the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis or at the outset of the most recent recession – so does the Canadian dollar.

The loonie's collapse a decade ago was hailed by then Bank of Canada governor Gordon Thiessen as proof of the benefits of a floating rate. The decline buffered the blow delivered to the economy by low resource prices by helping “Canadian manufacturing and other non-commodity sectors to increase their exports to the United States,” he said in a 2000 speech. “In this way, the impact of falling employment and incomes in our primary sector because of lower commodity prices was largely offset by greater expansion in other sectors.”

And this was a bad thing because ... why, exactly?

Mr. Thiessen's speech did not come out of the blue. At the time, economists here were embroiled in a heated debate about the pros and cons of North American monetary union. NAMU, as it was dubbed, was seen as the next logical step in the continuing integration of the Canadian, U.S. and Mexican economies, after the 1994 ratification of the North American free-trade agreement.

Excellent use of the passive voice. Who thought this, and why?

Talk of a currency union on this continent was also spurred by its realization in Europe in 1999. If countries as disparate as France, Finland, Italy and Ireland could do it, why couldn't two countries as economically and culturally integrated as Canada and the U.S?

You already answered that when you talked about natural resource prices, remember?

It soon became clear, however, that NAMU was a political no-no. Canadian economic nationalists equated common currency with a loss of sovereignty, just as they had fought the Canada-U.S. free-trade Agreement, saying it would mark the end of public health care here. Besides, it suited the Chrétien government to have a low loonie, to take the edge off its tight fiscal policy and create manufacturing jobs. Hence, as the Canadian dollar dug a historic trough, hitting 61.75 cents (U.S.) in 2002, Ontario was on its way to surpassing Michigan in auto production.

And this was a bad thing because ... why, exactly?

If the past decade has taught us anything, though, it is that Canada enjoys all the inconveniences of a floating exchange rate and independent monetary policy, with precious few of the benefits. The protracted low-dollar period wrought an unprecedented widening of the gap between Canadian and U.S. productivity levels, and has left our economy (outside the resource sector) painfully uncompetitive as our currency nears parity with the U.S. dollar.

It has taught us nothing of the sort. Over the past business cycle, the appreciation of the CAD has allowed us to have consistently lower interest rates. And the increase in commodity prices has been a significant contributor to Canadians' purchasing power. Why on earth should the source of these benefits be put in parentheses and forgotten?

A decade ago, Mr. Thiessen dismissed the idea that a low loonie would encourage Canadian businesses to get lazy. “If the argument here is that a low exchange rate gives exporting firms easier profits and blunts their motivation to innovate and become more efficient and competitive, I am inclined to say that this suggests a rather serious problem of corporate governance,” he countered. But blaming Canadian businesses for responding to the incentives created by a low dollar is like expecting an apple picker paid by the bushel to ignore the low hanging fruit for the McIntoshes on top. First things first, after all.

This is exactly backwards. The dollar was low because Canadian productivity was so abysmal.

When the dollar hovered around 60 cents, then 70 and later 80, everyone agreed that it was undervalued. Now as it approaches parity with the U.S. dollar and threatens to surpass it, as it did in 2007 and 2008 when the price of oil peaked near $150, almost everyone – including the Bank of Canada – insists it's overvalued.

Has there ever been a country whose exchange rate - whether it be fixed or floating - has always been correctly valued? Is today's Spain-Germany exchange rate correct?

But though the loonie has been extremely volatile in recent years, big and unjustified currency swings are nothing new. When they argued for Canada-U.S. a monetary union in 1999 C.D. Howe Institute paper, policy experts Thomas Courchene and Richard Harris noted that our floating dollar has been prone to "major and prolonged misalignments." This leaves the Bank of Canada constantly, and usually unconvincingly, trying to influence our supposedly free-floating exchange rate. This week, Mark Carney, the current Bank of Canada Governor, channelled Pierre Trudeau and dared speculators to question his resolve."Markets should take seriously our determination to set policy to achieve the inflation target. Markets sometimes lose their focus. We don't lose our focus.'" Such uncharacteristically blunt language from a central banker is a sign of panic.

Um, no. It's a sign that interest rates are at the zero lower bound. When we weren't at the lower bound, the Bank's response to such a situation was to cut interest rates. Was that a sign of panic as well?

A soaring Canadian dollar can create deflation, depressing the prices of imports and creating a Japan-like spiral into perennial recession.

Hence the need to cut interest rates. Or for quantitative easing, if that's not possible. Nothing we can't deal with.

Instead of easing economic shocks, then, leaving our chronically overshooting loonie to float ends up making adjustments more brutal and counterproductive than they need to be. What's more, the Bank of Canada's apparent indifference to where the country's economic growth comes from – whether from resources or value-added manufacturing and knowledge industries – ignores the fact that not all industries produce the same set of public goods. Some encourage a more innovative and educated work force than others. Some position us more for the future than others.

An absolute train wreck of a paragraph. How is an exchange rate regime going to favour one exporting sector over another? A lower CAD benefits resource exporters just as much as it does manufacturing exporters. And why should we care where the growth comes from? Is someone giving out points for style? How do you know that the real source of innovation won't be from the resources sector?

So, just why do we keep our loonie anyway? Is it to protect the illusion that Canada has a monetary policy truly independent from that of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board? Martin Coiteux, an economist and professor of international business at HEC Montreal, tracked monetary policy in both countries for a prolonged period up to 2004. He found that, though the Fed has a much broader mandate than the Bank of Canada, it had a better record of keeping inflation within the 1 per cent to 3 per cent band than our central bank. The Fed leads, the Bank of Canada follows. “Even if [the bank] says we have a made-in-Canada monetary policy, it mostly tracks that of the Fed,” he says.

I'm going to guess that this is the study in question. I'm afraid I'm not convinced. From the Coiteux article:

the Canadian terms of trade, relative to the US terms of trade, have shown no declining trend over the last twenty years... How could the price of commodities argument explain the downward trend in the value of the Canadian dollar?

Here is a graph of our terms of trade and the Bank's broad commodity price index (this monthly series converted to quarterly averages):

One reason why commodities didn't play a significant role in Coiteux' sample is that they didn't move very much. And it may be true that when commodity prices are stable, there are no particular gains from having an independent monetary policy. But when commodity prices do move - whether it's in the late 1940's or the late 2000's - the advantages of having a floating exchange rate are significant. Think of it this way: lifeboats are a waste of space and weight in good weather, but they're handy to have around when a storm swamps your ship.

Nothing proves his point more than the present. One of the reasons markets had, until this week, been expecting the Bank of Canada to follow Australia's recent lead and start raising interest rates soon is that the Canadian housing market is looking dangerously bubbly. House prices have risen 14 per cent in the past year. But the bank is standing pat, Mr. Coiteux reckons, because any increase in the spread between Canadian and U.S. interest rates would send the loonie even farther into the stratosphere.

I thought the problem was that the Bank was 'panicking' by considering quantitative easing to bring down the exchange rate. But here we find that the problem is that the Bank should be tightening policy, increasing interest rates and increasing the exchange rate! And it can't! Or can it? It's all so confusing! Is there no end to the havoc that an independent monetary policy can wreak? Won't Mr Bernanke remove the burden of this choice from us?

The past 10 years have reinforced Mr. Courchene's belief that some kind of currency union is essential to this country's long-term prosperity. If the U.S. dollar is now in secular decline against other global currencies, as many argue, then Canada needs to get with it and start negotiating with Washington. “It's in decline that we're really going to get clobbered,” Mr. Courchene warns. “Suppose the U.S. dollar goes so far down that the Canadian dollar goes to $1.30 instead of 95 cents. Is that what we want?”

Maybe it is. Why not? If one CAD were worth 1 trillion USD, I could buy the entire US economy with the loose change in my car. Would that be so a bad situation to find ourselves?

Canada could just adopt the U.S. dollar and be done with it. But we would be better off with a formal currency union that allowed for some Canadian representation, and influence, in the Federal Reserve System.

Naysayers have always said the Americans would never go for it. Mr. Courchene thinks Canada, with the world's second-largest oil reserves, has a strong argument going for it. “The Americans would like the idea [of Canadian representation] more than they did a decade ago because the entire Canadian commodity world would come entirely within their currency area, so they wouldn't get anywhere near the oil shocks they're getting now.”

I don't see how a monetary union with Canada would mean cheap oil for the US. And if it does, why is that a good deal for Canada?

China may have just overtaken Canada as the biggest exporter to the United States. But the title is possibly temporary and any suggestion that this country would do better by reducing its reliance on the U.S. market is based on wishful thinking. No other major country faces better long-term economic or demographic prospects than the U.S. By 2050, the U.S. work force w's ill have grown by 30 per cent; China's will have contracted by 3 per cent. The median age in China will be 44, up from 33 now. The U.S. will age only marginally. Its median age will rise to 39 from 36. China, the saying goes, will get old before it gets rich.

Why is this at all relevant to a discussion of a Canada-US monetary union?

Canada needs to take heed. Clinging to the loonie's woeful song is no way to keep our economy humming. Those paper George Washingtons may be an anachronism in our coin-loving culture, but the U.S. dollar is not destined to become one any time soon.

And so we end with a non sequitur. The US dollar isn't going to disappear, so the Canadian dollar must! Neither can live while the other survives!

Here's a question that Mr Yakabuski didn't discuss: Would we have been better off in the last recession if a monetary union had already been in place? Consider what monetary independence gave us over the past 12 months:

• A 25-30% depreciation to cushion the blow of the recession
• A central bank that didn't have to participate in the bailout of US banks

I'd be very interested in a counterfactual explaining how the recession would have been less painful if Canada and the US had shared the same currency. If none is forthcoming, then I'm going to somewhat less kind the next time someone floats the idea of monetary union.

Comments

[Brett]

Not only are you gentle and wise, unlike folks at The Economist, you even know what the passive voice is.

[travis fast]

I have to admit that was soooo goooood!

[brendon]

now that was a smackdown, bravo!

[bob]

haha nice

This one really takes the cake.. probably the worst article on economics ever published by the G&M, and that's saying a lot.

It's strange that the average Canadian has a better grasp of economics than the journalists/politicians/bay street economists/talking heads featured in our national media. Even in the G&M comments section for that article, 95% of the comments are about how idiotic the article is, and most of them are actually based on a decent understanding of economics: fungibility of oil, optimal currency areas etc.

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=611985302]

I think I understand where this twitdom is coming from. I've been in a situation for a while now that I have been getting paid in US dollars from US banks. The result is unpleasant and expensive. Even ignoring exchange rate issues. I am assuming the G+M editorial staff is being harassed by people in this situation. There area not enough people dealing with this circumstance to justify a direct attack on the problem, so they create a related problem and it's justifications to make the attack work.

The ultimate champion of floating exchange rates was Jane Jacobs. She figured that places like Cape Breton would be much better off if they had their own currency to adjust.

BTW, thank you for permitting me to avoid the pain of reading the article.

[original anon]

Here's an exception in today's Globe ROB by a Bay Street economist with some real smarts - David Rosenberg:

If there is one thing that Canadians are never happy with (in addition to their local hockey team) it is the Canadian dollar. When it was flirting near that record low of 62 cents nearly a decade ago, everyone lamented the future of the loonie. It was too expensive to buy anything that was imported, it was too costly to make that annual trip to Florida, and tickets on Broadway were prohibitively expensive. We felt poorer. We must have been doing something wrong.

But we did nothing wrong back in those days because it was 100 per cent a U.S. dollar story. The U.S. was home to the Internet mania – and all the global capital flow that came with it – and Robert Rubin, treasury secretary at the time, was carrying out an overtly strong dollar policy partly to keep inflation at bay. I recall all too well telling clients that the loonie was actually either holding its own or appreciating against the global basket of non-U.S. dollar currencies. People would just roll their eyes.

Today, Canadians are fretting about a strong currency. After all, it is going to crush our manufacturing sector, kill our export base and undermine our domestic competitiveness. Even the Bank of Canada is saying the strength in the Canadian dollar is dampening our growth prospects.

Let's all step back and take a deep breath. For years when the Canadian dollar was trading around 60 cents, exporters did indeed reap the rewards, while importers were hit hard by rising costs. Our exports to the U.S. did improve, but we needed that source of growth as an antidote to the pain from the budget belt-tightening during the 1990s. Of course, there was no shortage of complaints from snowbirds headed south.

Today's strong Canadian dollar is obviously a tremendous challenge to our exporters, but hopefully they were getting their house in order when they were sheltered by those years of Canadian dollar depreciation.

While Canada is a large exporter, we also are a huge importer. At $400-billion annually, we import as much as we export, and the cost of those imports are now going down – a very good thing for profit margins.

While it may be a roadblock for our manufacturing sector, the loonie's ascent is good in many respects. Our purchasing power and standard of living are actually going up.

Now, why is the Canadian dollar back near parity against the greenback? There are valid reasons for the strength of the Canadian dollar, and they are likely to persist for the next several years.

Just as Canada had to rely on a soft currency in the 1990s, cleaning up the budgetary mess in the U.S. is going to require a similar strategy. I would contend that the Obama administration is already carrying out a policy of ‘benign neglect' when it comes to the U.S. dollar.

Moreover, commodities have resumed their upward trend, accentuated by the growth in emerging Asia, which was merely dented amid the worst of the credit crisis.

Canada has three times more exposure to commodities than the U.S. and while this was an albatross during much of the 1990s, it is helping to lift the Canadian dollar now.

Finally, according to Moody's and the World Economic Forum, for the second year in a row, Canadian banks are ranked No. 1 in the world. During this cycle, no Canadian bank failed, went cap-in-hand to the government, or even cut its dividend. While we did experience a housing mania (2003-07), our banks never suffered what their counterparts in the U.S. did. Call it good luck. Call it good management. Call it a combination of the two.

On the policy front, it goes without saying that Canada's pro-market Conservative government is more likely to follow policies that attract global capital than a left-leaning government south of the border. Indeed, Canada is witnessing a boom in capital inflows. Foreign investors plowed $5.1-billion into the Canadian markets, and year-to-date, have added a record $67.4-billion of Canadian securities to their portfolios. The fact that Canada is now a beacon for global capital flows is something, I think, we should be proud of.

For its part, the Bank of Canada has said that “persistent strength in the Canadian dollar” is going to “slow growth and subdue inflation pressures.” So, in return for softer growth, what we get back is lower “inflation pressures.” The winner here is anyone who needs to borrow money – a strong loonie will prevent the Band of Canada from taking the interest-rate punchbowl away any time soon.

For Canadian businesses, the silver lining is that it will be easier to attract talent than it was when the loonie was sinking – a reverse brain drain of sorts. Whatever it is, it is a good thing from a productivity standpoint, which is the cornerstone of our standard of living. That is why I think we should embrace this new era of strength for the loonie.

David Rosenberg is chief strategist for Gluskin Sheff + Associates Inc. and a guest columnist for Report on Business

[No One]

Thanks for the article. In the history of dollarization, my favorite is the nasty little Sherri (is that with an I or a Y?) Cooper. She used to be a regular on the tube insisting Canada throw in the towel as a country and throw ourselves on the mercy of the US.

She was big when the dollar was around 70 cents - thank god she was not making policy. Too bad people like her don't get fired for being so spectacularly wrong.

[Patrick]

"Is today's Spain-Germany exchange rate correct?"

Spanish unemployment: 17.93%

Ireland Unemployment (April 2009): 11.4%. In 2007 it was something like 4.6%.

I suspect they'd both like to have their own floating currency back again.

[Matthew]

Wow....I could somewhat understand appeals for monetary union in the late 1990s, but now? Is this guy on crazy pills?

[GA]

In the spirit of Brad DeLong, I thank you for taking apart the idiocy of this article so that the rest of us don't have to read it. If this keeps up, you will have to stop linking to the G&M.

The Globe used to be (relatively) smart. Either it is getting more stupid, or the rest of the world is getting smarter. I see little evidence of the latter claim.

How about another basic question: if we are going to have the same currency, do we not also have to have a unified financial (banking) regime? (As the Europeans have mostly admitted, even if they're not there yet)

Ummmmmmmmmmm, HOW exactly would this be beneficial to Canada?

We can criticise the BoC and the regulators, but when it comes to banking sector regulation, Canada is clearly the Tallest Midget in the World. (TM)

[Mark]

GA: The rest of the world is getting smarter. Hence why the G&M gives me free daily delivery now. No one pays for this junk anymore. 10 years and they will be done.

[original anon]

Anybody wanna become Ecuador?

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/fixed-rates-and-protectionism-2009-edition/

[edited to make the click-through link - SG]

[Stephen Gordon]

Exactly!

And I see that there's a complimentary link to here in the comments. Merci Guillaume!

[Loof]

The common USD-CAD currency issue is a special case relative to deeper integration of the two economies. In rejecting the currency case, does it raise the question regarding the value of Canada’s “free trade” agreement with America? That integration deal has been the format for special state-to-state trade agreements that has primarily served corporate interests not only in NA, but worldwide, I believe. Would Canada have been (still be?) better off promoting the principle and practice of free-trade worldwide, without Fortress North America?

[Declan]

People arguing for currency union with the U.S. always remind me of a quote from David Hume where he dismisses those who argue that people are motivated solely by self-interest,

"All attempts of this kind have hitherto proved fruitless, and seem to have proceeded entirely from that love of SIMPLICITY which has been the source of much false reasoning in philosophy. I shall not here enter into any detail on the present subject. Many able philosophers have shown the insufficiency of these systems. And I shall take for granted what, I believe, the smallest reflection will make evident to every impartial enquirer."

[tyronen]

The article was politically even more lunatic. The Americans will never let another country into the Federal Reserve Board. Canadians might be persuaded to accept a fixed exchange rate, but I cannot imagine them giving up their national currency.

[Broxburnboy]

This Canadian government already lets Washington dictate our "homeland security" policies and supports the US in their fruitless and self destructive foreign wars, a stark turnaround from previous hard won, made-in-Canada policies, so why not throw in the loonie too?
Let Harper publicly boot lick the American Federal Reserve by forcing Canadians to trade in their loonies for the rapidly deteriorating greenback as a means of having Canadians help pay for the disastrous American foreign and monetary policies, and line the pockets of the foreign banksters!