Throughout history, big economic and political shocks have often occurred in August, when leaders had gone on vacation in the belief that world affairs were quiet.   Examples of geopolitical jolts that came in August include the outbreak of World War I, the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 and the Berlin Wall in 1961.  Subsequent examples of economic and other surprises in August have included the Nixon shock of 1971 (when the American president enacted wage-price controls, took the dollar off gold, and imposed trade controls), 1982 eruption in Mexico of the international debt crisis, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the 1991 Soviet coup, 1992 crisis in the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and US subprime mortgage crisis of 2007.   Many of these shocks constituted events that had previously not even appeared on most radar screens. They were considered unthinkable. 

The phrase “black swans” has come to be used to mean a very unlikely event of this sort.  Managers of Long Term Capital Management in 1998 or of most major banks in 2008 have suggested that they could not be expected to have allowed for a financial collapse such as the one that followed the default of Russia or the one that followed the bursting of the US housing bubble, because it was a “7-standard deviation event,” that is, an event of inconceivably tiny probability…in the realm of the probability that two major meteors hit the earth at the same time.   This is nonsense.  If the statistical model says the probability of a financial crisis is that low, it is the model that is wrong.  This is like the case when “hundred-year floods” turn up every few years.

A bit more enlightened are people who talk about Knightian uncertainty or “unknown unknowns.” Ignorance with humility is better than ignorance without it.    A still better interpretation is that statistical distributions have “fat tails,” in technical terms.  But it would be nice to get beyond the Jurassic Park lesson (”don’t be surprised if things go wrong”), to be able to say intelligent things about what causes tail events. 

       What does “black swan” really mean?   In my view, it should refer to an event that is considered virtually impossible by those whose frame of reference is limited in time span and geographical area, but that is well within the probability distribution for those whose data set includes other countries besides their own and other decades or centuries. 

      Consider five examples of mistakes made by those whose memory did not extend beyond a few years or decades of personal experience in a small number of countries.

1. “All swans are white.”  The origin of the black swan metaphor was the belief that all swans were white, a conclusion that might have been reached by a 19^th century Englishman based on a lifetime of personal observation and David Hume’s principle of induction.   But ornithologists already knew that there in fact existed black swans in Australia, having discovered them in 1697.  A 19^th-century Englishman encountering a black swan for the first time might have considered it an event of unthinkably low probability, even though the relevant information to the contrary had already been available in ornithology books.  It seems a waste of an excellent metaphor to use the term just to mean a highly unexpected event.  A better use of “black swan” would be to mean an event that would not have been quite so unexpected ex ante if forecasters had cast their data net over a broader set of countries and a longer time perspective.

 2. “Terrorists don’t blow up big office buildings.”   Before September 11, 2001, some terrorist experts warned that foreign terrorists might try to blow up tall American office buildings.   These warnings were not taken seriously by those in power at the time.   Many Americans did not know the history of terrorist events taking place in other countries and in other decades.  

 3. “Housing prices don’t fall.” Many Americans up to 2006 based their behavior on the assumption that nominal housing prices, even if they slowed down, would not fall.   After all, “they never had before,” which meant that they had not fallen in living memory in the United States.   They may not have been aware that housing prices had often fallen in other countries, and in the US before the 1940s.  Needless to say, many a decision would have been made very differently, whether by indebted homeowners or leveraged bank executives, if they had thought there was a non-negligible chance of an outright decline in prices.

 4. “Volatilities are low.”   During the years 2004-06, financial markets perceived market risk as very low.  This was most nakedly visible in the implicit volatilities in options prices such as the VIX.  But it was also manifest in junk bond spreads, sovereign spreads, and many other financial prices.  One of the reasons for this historic mis-pricing of risk is that traders were plugging into their Black-Scholes formulas estimates of variances that went back only a few years, or at most a few decades (the period of the late “Great Moderation”).  They should have gone back much farther - or better yet, formed judgments based on a more comprehensive assessment of what risks might lie in wait for the world economy.

 5. “Big banks don’t fail.”   ”Governments of advanced countries don’t default.”   ”European governments don’t default.”  Enough said.  Greece’s debt troubles, in particular, should not have caught anyone by surprise, least of all northern Europeans.   The perception was that euro countries were fundamentally different from emerging markets, that like Germany they were free of default risk.  Suddenly, in 2010, the Greek sovereign spread shot up, exceeding 800% by June. But even when the Greek crisis erupted, leaders in Brussels and Frankfurt seemed to view it as a black swan, instead of recognizing it as a close cousin of the Argentine crisis of ten years earlier, the Mexican crisis of 1994, and many others in history, including among European countries.

      My next blog post will list some of the shocks that, even though low-probability, have high enough probability that they should be treated as thinkable rather than unthinkable, they would have great consequences, and they therefore warrant some advance preparation.

Emerging markets have performed amazingly well over the last seven years. They have outperformed the advanced industrialized countries in terms of economic growth, debt-to-GDP ratios, and countercyclical fiscal policy.  Many now receive better assessments by rating agencies and financial markets than some of the advanced economies.

As 2012 begins, however, emerging markets may be due for a correction, triggered by a new wave of “risk off” behavior among investors. Will China experience a hard landing? Will a decline in commodity prices hit Latin America? Will the sovereign-debt woes of the European periphery spread to neighbors such as Turkey in a new “Aegean crisis”?

Engorged by large capital inflows, some emerging market countries were in an overheated state a year ago. It is unlikely that the rapid economic growth and high trade deficits that Turkey has experienced in recent years can be sustained. Likewise, high GDP growth rates in Brazil and Argentina over the same period could soon reverse, particularly if global commodity prices fall - not a remote prospect if the Chinese economy falters or global real interest rates were to rise this year. China, for its part, could land hard as its real-estate bubble deflates and the country’s banks are forced to work off their bad loans.

The World Bank has now downgraded economic forecasts for developing countries in 2012 (Global Economic Prospects, Jan.18, 2012).    Brazil’s economic growth, for example, came to a halt in the third quarter of 2011 and is forecast at only 3.4 percent in 2012 …well below the rapid 2010 growth rate of 7.5 percent.  Reflecting a sharp slowdown in the second half of the year in India, South Asia is coming off of a torrid six years, including 9.1 percent growth in 2010.  Regional growth is projected to ease further to 5.8 percent in 2012.

But will economic slowdown turn to financial crash?   Three possible lines of argument support the worry that emerging markets’ performance are fated to suffer dramatically in 2012: empirical, literary, and causal. Each line of argument is admittedly tentative.

The empirical argument is just historically based numerology: emerging-market crises seem to come in 15-year cycles. The international debt crisis surfaced in Mexico in mid-1982, and then spread to the rest of Latin America and beyond. The East Asian crisis erupted 15 years later, in Thailand in mid-1997, and then spread to the rest of the region and beyond. We are now another 15 years down the road. So is 2012 the time for the third round of emerging markets crises?

The hypothesis of regular boom-bust cycles is supported by a long-standing scholarly literature, such as the writings of Carmen Reinhart. But I would appeal to an even older source: the Old Testament - in particular, the story of Joseph, who was called upon by the Pharaoh to interpret a dream about seven fat cows followed by seven skinny cows.

Joseph prophesied that there would come seven years of plenty, with abundant harvests from an overflowing Nile, followed by seven lean years, with famine resulting from drought. His forecast turned out to be accurate. Fortunately the Pharaoh had empowered his technocratic official (Joseph) to save grain in the seven years of plenty, building up sufficient stockpiles to save the Egyptian people from starvation during the bad years. That is a valuable lesson for today’s government officials in industrialized and developing countries alike.

For emerging markets, the first phase of seven years of plentiful capital flows occurred in 1975-1981, with the recycling of petrodollars in the form of loans to developing countries.  The international debt crisis that began in Mexico in 1982 was the catalyst for the seven lean years, known in Latin America as the “lost decade.” The turnaround year, 1989, was marked by the first issue of Brady bonds, which helped write down the debt overhang and put a line under the crisis.

The second cycle of seven fat years was the period of record capital flows to emerging markets in 1990-1996.  Following the 1997 “sudden stop” in East Asia came seven years of capital drought. The third cycle of inflows, often identified as a “carry trade,” came in 2004-2011 and persisted even through the global financial crisis. If history repeats itself, it is now time for a third sudden stop of capital flows to emerging markets.

Are a couple of data points and a biblical parable enough to take the hypothesis of a 15-year cycle seriously?  We need some sort of causal theory that could explain such periodicity to international capital flows.

Here is a possibility: 15 years is how long it takes for individual loan officers and hedge-fund traders to be promoted out of their jobs. Today’s young crop of asset pickers knows that there was a crisis in Turkey in 2001, but they did not experience it first hand. They think that perhaps this time is different.  

If emerging markets crash in 2012, remember where you heard it first - in ancient Egypt.

[This article was published in Project Syndicate, which holds the copyright.]

Libyans have a new lease on life, a feeling that, at long last, they are the masters of their own fate. Perhaps Iraqis, after a decade of warfare, feel the same way. Both countries are oil producers, and there is widespread expectation among their citizens that that wealth will be a big advantage in rebuilding their societies.

Meanwhile, in Africa, Ghana has begun pumping oil for the first time, and Uganda is about to do so as well. Indeed, from West Africa to Mongolia, countries are experiencing windfalls from new sources of oil and mineral wealth. Adding to the euphoria are the historic highs that oil and mineral prices have reached on world markets over the last four years.

Many countries have been in this position before, exhilarated by natural-resource bonanzas, only to see the boom end in disappointment and the opportunity squandered with little payoff in terms of a better quality of life for their people. But, whether in Libya or Ghana, these countries’ current leaders have an advantage: most are well aware of history, and want to know how to avoid the infamous natural-resource “curse.”

To prescribe a cure, one must first diagnose the illness. Why do oil riches turn out to be a curse as often as they are a blessing?

Economists have identified six pitfalls that can afflict natural-resource exporters: commodity-price volatility, crowding out of manufacturing, “Dutch disease” (a booming export industry causes rapid currency appreciation , which undermines other exporters’ competitiveness), excessively rapid resource depletion, inhibition of institutional development, and civil war.

Oil prices are especially volatile, as the large swings over the last five years remind us. The recent oil boom could easily turn to bust, especially if global economic activity slows.

Volatility itself is costly, leaving economies unable to respond effectively to price signals. Temporary commodity booms typically pull workers, capital, and land away from fledgling manufacturing sectors and production of other internationally traded goods. This reallocation can damage long-term economic development if those sectors are the ones that nurture learning by doing and fuel broader productivity gains.

The problem is not just that workers, capital, and land are sucked into the booming commodity sector. They also are frequently lured away from manufacturing by booms in construction and other non-tradable goods and services. The pattern also includes an exuberant expansion of government spending, which can result in bloated public payrolls and large infrastructure projects, both of which are found to be unsustainable when oil prices fall. If the manufacturing sector has been “hollowed out” in the meantime, so much the worse.

Another pitfall is excessively rapid depletion of oil or mineral deposits, in violation of optimal rates of saving, let alone preservation of the environment.   

Even if high oil revenues turn out to be permanent, pitfalls nonetheless abound. Governments that can finance themselves simply by retaining physical control over the oil or mineral deposits located within their borders often fail in the long run to develop institutions that are conducive to economic development.  Such countries evolve a hierarchical authoritarian society where the only incentive is to compete for privileged access to commodity rents. In the extreme case, this competition can take the form of civil war. In a country without resource wealth, by contrast, elites have little alternative but to nurture a decentralized economy in which individuals have incentives to work and save. These are the economies that industrialize.

What can countries do to ensure that natural resources are a blessing rather than a curse?  Some policies and institutions have been tried and failed. These include, in particular, attempts to suppress artificially the fluctuations of the global marketplace by imposing price controls, export controls, marketing boards, and cartels.

But some countries have succeeded, and their strategies could be useful models for Libya, Iraq, Ghana, Mongolia, and others to emulate. These include: hedging export earnings - for example, via the oil options market, as Mexico does; ensuring countercyclical fiscal policy - for example via Chile’s kind of structural budget rule; and delegating sovereign wealth funds to professional managers, as Botswana’s Pula Fund does.

Finally, some promising ideas have virtually never been tried at all: linking bonds to oil prices instead of dollars, to protect against the risk of a price decline; choosing Product Price Targeting as an alternative to either inflation targeting or exchange-rate targeting, to play the role of anchor for monetary policy; and distributing oil revenues on a nationwide per capita basis, to ensure that they do not wind up in elites’ Swiss bank accounts.

Leaders have free will. Oil exporters need not be prisoners of a curse that has befallen others. Countries can choose to use their resource bonanzas for the long-term economic advancement of their peoples.

[This column originally appeared at Project Syndicate.  Comments can be posted there.]

The prices of minerals, hydrocarbons, and agricultural commodities have been on a veritable roller coaster. Although commodity prices are always more variable than those for manufactured goods and services, commodity markets over the last five years have seen extraordinary volatility.

Countries that specialize in the export of oil, copper, iron ore, wheat, coffee, or other commodities have boomed.  But they are highly vulnerable. Dollar commodity prices could plunge at any time, as a result of a new global recession, a hard landing in China, an increase in real interest rates in the United States, fluctuations in climate, or random sector-specific factors.

Countries that have outstanding debt in dollars or other foreign currencies are especially vulnerable. If their export revenues were to plunge relative to their debt-service obligations, the result could be crashes reminiscent of Latin America’s debt crisis in 1982 or the Asian and Russian currency crises of 1997-1998.

Many developing countries have made progress since the 1990’s in shifting from dollar-denominated debt toward foreign direct investment and other types of capital inflows, or in paying down their liabilities altogether. But some commodity exporters still seek ways to borrow that won’t expose them to excessive risk.

Commodity bonds may offer a neat way to circumvent these risks. Exporters of any particular commodity should issue debt that is denominated in terms of the price of that commodity, rather than in dollars or any other currency. Jamaica, for example, would issue alumina bonds; Nigeria would issue oil bonds; Sierra Leone would issue iron-ore bonds; and Mongolia would issue copper bonds. Investors would be able to buy Guatemala’s coffee bonds, Côte d’Ivoire’s cocoa bonds, Liberia’s rubber bonds, Mali’s cotton bonds; and Ghana’s gold bonds.

The advantage of such bonds is that in the event of a decline in the world price of the underlying commodity, the country’s debt-to-export ratio need not rise. The cost of debt service adjusts automatically, without the severe disruption that results from loss of confidence, crisis, debt restructuring, and so forth.

The idea is not new. (The oldest reference I know is Lessard & Williamson, 1985.)  So, why has it not been tried before? When one asks finance ministers in commodity-exporting debtor countries, they frequently reply that they fear insufficient demand for commodity bonds.

That is a surprising proposition, given that commodity bonds have an obvious latent market, rooted in real economic fundamentals. After all, steel companies have an inherent need to hedge against fluctuations in the price of iron ore, just as airlines and utilities have an inherent need to hedge against fluctuations in the price of oil.  Each of these commodities is an important input for major corporations. Surely there is at least as much natural demand for commodity bonds as there is for credit-default swaps and some of the bizarrely complicated derivatives that are currently traded!

It takes liquidity to make a market successful, and it can be difficult to get a new one started until it achieves a certain critical mass. The problem may be that there are not many investors who want to take a long position on oil and Nigerian credit risk simultaneously.

A multilateral agency such as the World Bank could play a critical role in launching a market in commodity bonds. The fit would be particularly good in those countries where the Bank is already lending money.

Here is how it would work. Instead of denominating a loan to Nigeria in terms of dollars, the Bank would denominate it in terms of the price of oil; it would then turn around and lay off its exposure to the world oil price by issuing that same quantity of bonds denominated in oil. If the Bank lends to multiple oil-exporting countries, the market for oil bonds that it creates would be that much larger and more liquid. It can serve an additional important pooling function in cases where there are different grades or varieties of the product (as with oil or coffee), and where prices can diverge enough to make an important difference to the exporters.  The Bank could link the bond it issues to an oil price index, a weighted average of various product grades.

An alternative for some commodity exporters is to hedge their risk by selling on the futures market. But an important disadvantage of derivatives is their short maturity. A West African country with newly discovered oil reserves needs to finance exploration, drilling, and pipeline construction, which means that it needs to hedge at a time horizon of 10-20 years, not 90 days.

Another disadvantage of derivatives is that they require a high degree of sophistication –both technical and political. In the event of an increase in a commodity’s price, a finance minister who has done a perfect job ex ante of hedging export-price risk on the futures market will suddenly find himself accused ex post of having gambled away the national patrimony. This principal-agent problem is much diminished in the case of commodity bonds.

If the international financial wizards can get together and act on this idea now, commodity exporters might be able to avoid calamity the next time the world price of their product takes a plunge.  The World Bank should take up the cause.

Under French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s leadership, the G-20 has made addressing food-price volatility a top priority this year, with member states’ agriculture ministers meeting recently in Paris to come up with solutions. The choice of priorities has turned out to be timely: world food prices reached a record high earlier in 2011, recalling a similar price spike in 2008.

Consumers are hurting worldwide, especially the poor, for whom food takes a major bite out of household budgets. Popular discontent over food prices has fueled political instability in some countries, most notably in Egypt and Tunisia. Even agricultural producers would prefer some price stability over the wild ups and downs of the last five years.

The G-20’s efforts will culminate in the Cannes Summit in November. But, when it comes to specific policies, caution will be very much in order, for there is a long history of measures aimed at reducing commodity-price volatility that have ended up doing more harm than good.

For example, some inflation-targeting central banks have reacted to increases in prices of imported commodities by tightening monetary policy and thereby increasing the value of the currency. But adverse movements in the terms of trade must be accommodated; they cannot be fought with monetary policy.

Producing countries have also tried to contain price volatility by forming international cartels. But these have seldom worked.  

In theory, government stockpiles might be able to smooth price fluctuations, releasing commodities in times of shortage and adding to stocks when prices are low.   A free-marketer will point out that they can undermine the incentive for the private sector to hold stockpiles.  A valid response is that this incentive is undermined regardless, because political economy never allows “hoarders” to “price gouge” in times of food crisis.    It all depends on how stockpiles are administered.  The record in practice is not encouraging.

In rich countries, where the primary producing sector usually has political power, stockpiles of food products are used as a means of keeping prices high rather than low. The European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy is a classic example – and has been disastrous for EU budgets, economic efficiency, and consumer pocketbooks.

In many developing countries, on the other hand, farmers lack political power.  Some African countries adopted commodity boards for coffee and cocoa at the time of independence. Although the original rationale was to buy the crop in years of excess supply and sell in years of excess demand, thereby stabilizing prices, in practice the price paid to cocoa and coffee farmers, who were politically weak, was always below the world price.  In response, production fell.

Politicians often seek to shield consumers through price controls on staple foods and energy.  But the artificially suppressed price usually requires rationing to domestic households. (Shortages and long lines can fuel political rage as well as higher prices can.). Otherwise, the policy can require increased imports in order to satisfy the excess demand, and so can raise the world price even more.

If the country is a producer of the commodity in question, it may use export controls  to insulate domestic consumers from increases in the world price. In 2008, India capped rice exports, and Argentina did the same for wheat exports, as did Russia in 2010.

Export restrictions in producing countries and price controls in importing countries both serve to exacerbate the magnitude of the world price upswing, owing to the artificially reduced quantity that is still internationally traded. If producing and consuming countries in grain markets could cooperatively agree to refrain from such government intervention, working through the World Trade Organization, world price volatility could be lower.

In the meantime, some obvious steps should be taken.  It is too bad that the G20 attempt to do away with bio-fuel subsidies has failed, so far. Ethanol subsidies, such as those paid to American corn farmers, do not accomplish policymakers’ avowed environmental goals, but do divert grain and thus help drive up world food prices. By now this should be clear to everybody. But one cannot really expect the G-20 agriculture ministers to be able to fix the problem. After all, their constituents, the farmers, are the ones pocketing the money. The US, it must be said, is the biggest obstacle here.

What the G-20 farm ministers — meeting for the first time June 23 — have agreed is to forge an Agricultural Market Information System to improve transparency in agricultural markets, including information about production, stocks, and prices. More complete and timely information might indeed help.

But speculation is not necessarily destabilizing. Sarkozy is right that leverage is not necessarily good just because the free market allows it.  And that speculators occasionally act in a destabilizing way. But speculators more often act as detectors of changes in economic fundamentals and provide the signals that smooth fluctuations. In other words, they often are a stabilizing force.

The French have not yet been able to obtain agreement from the other G-20 members on measures aimed at regulating commodity speculators, such as limits on the size of their investment positions. I hope it stays that way. Shooting the messenger is no way to respond to the message.

[This op-ed appeared via Project Syndicate.  Comments can be posted at that site.]

     Robert Zoellick put a few sentences about gold toward the end of a column in today’s FT that are drawing a lot of attention.   I doubt very much if the World Bank President has in mind a return to the gold standard, but goldbugs and critics alike are talking as if he does.

      Even if one placed overwhelming weight on the objective of price stability — enough weight to contemplate a rigid straightjacket for monetary policy — gold would not be a suitable anchor.   The economy would be hostage to the vagaries of the world gold market, as it was in the 19^th century:   suffering inflation during periods of gold discoveries and deflation during periods of gold drought.   This is well-known.   I am confident Zoellick understands it.   (He and I were in the same macroeconomics seminar at Swarthmore College in the 1970s.)

      I think he is making another point.  The world is moving away from a monetary system in which the dollar is the overwhelmingly dominant international reserve asset.  The dollar’s share of international reserves has been declining ever since Richard Nixon unilaterally ended the Bretton Woods system in 1971.   The dollar’s unique role is not an eternal god-given constant of the universe, any more than it was for pound sterling.  The US currency of course replaced the pound in the first half of the 20^th century, with a lag of 25 years or more after the US surpassed the UK economically.

      Will some asset replace the dollar, then?  No, not a single asset.  But we are probably moving to a system where there will be as many as a half dozen international reserve assets.  First, there is the euro.  Despite the serious troubles facing it this year, the euro has been a competitor for the dollar since it came into being 11 years ago.  Both the yen and the Swiss franc have to some extent played safe haven roles during the last three years of global financial turmoil.  The pound is not out completely.   Some day the renminbi will be added to the roster of major international currencies, when China’s financial markets are sufficiently developed and open.    Even the SDR (special drawing right) came back from the dead in 2009.

      And, yes, gold too has re-joined the world monetary system.  Gold was seen as an anachronism as recently as a couple of years ago.  The world’s central banks had been gradually selling off their stocks.   But all that changed in 2009.  The People’s Bank of China, the Reserve Bank of India and other central banks in Asia have bought gold.  Understandably, they want to diversify their reserves.    It appears that central banks have stopped selling gold even among advanced countries and that aggregate gold reserves have risen over the last year.   This is a multiple reserve asset system.      

[For those interested in gold and other mineral commodities, I have some relevant writings.  Others' views on Zoellick are at the New York Times.]

         My last blog post listed some policies and institutions with which various small countries around the world have had success — innovations that might be worthy of emulation by others.  Of course there are plenty of other examples of policies and institutions that have been tried and that are to be avoided.    The area of agricultural policy is rife with them.   Many start with a confused invoking of the need for “food security.”

          The recent run-up in wheat prices is a good example.   Robert Paarlberg wrote an excellent column in the Financial Times recently, titled “How grain markets sow the spikes they fear.”   Grain producing countries point to the high volatility of prices on world markets and the need for food security when imposing taxes on exports of their own grain supplies, or outright bans, as Russia did in July.    The motive, of course, is to keep grain affordable for domestic consumers.  But the effect of such export controls is precisely to cause the price rise that is feared, because it removes some net supply from the world market.    (The same could be said when grain importing countries react to high prices by enacting price controls, because that adds some net demand to the world market.)   

            The current run-up in grain prices is reminiscent of the even higher spike in food prices in 2008.   As Paarlberg argues, many of the other explanations that were put forward for that episode don’t fit this time.   The importance of export controls is now clearer.

            In 2008 Argentina imposed export tariffs to prevent its grain farmers from taking advantage of high world prices.   (This case seemed particularly irrational in that, unlike the usual case, the strongest political pressures came from the growers, not the consumers.)    At the same time, on the other side of the world, India put on export controls to prevent its rice farmers from selling their product on world markets to take advantage of high rice prices.   Controls imposed by Argentina, India, and others were important contributing factors to the global spike in food prices.

            Are governments indeed being completely irrational?   The commodities we are talking about are staples in the consumption of ordinary households.   For simplicity, let’s assume it is an absolute constraint that governments cannot allow grain prices to go above a certain threshold.    Perhaps there will be riots in the streets otherwise.  In this case might it make sense to put on export controls when the price threatens to go above that level?   One can see the motivation in the short run.   But, thinking in the long run, across complete cycles, controls are not a good answer.  

            One can imagine various sensible long-term policies that might assure that this constraint is not violated, such as stockpiling, although in practice many policies sold as “food security” are not in fact applied in a sensible way.

            One solution may be for major countries that are active in the market for wheat or rice to get together and agree not to impose controls.   The result would be to stabilize prices: no more alternation of price spikes and price collapses.  Each country could then rely more on the world market to cover shortfalls than it can now, when trade is made less dependable by the threat of controls by others.   The case of rice controls was nailed in a paper on food security written last year by two students in Harvard’s MPAID program (Masters in International Development), Naoko Koyama Blanc and Diva Singh.  In their model, it can indeed under certain conditions be rational for India to follow the practice of imposing controls when the price goes up, under a regime where volatility is high because others impose controls.  But it would be more rational for India to negotiate a no-controls regime with other countries, because under that regime volatility would be lower, the controls would not be needed, and everyone would be better off.   

            As Chile’s President Michelle Bachelet prepares to hand over power to her newly elected successor, she remains extraordinarily popular.  It is worth reflecting on the fiscal aspects of her term in office, as Chile has important lessons for other countries struggling with fundamental long-term budget problems, which includes a lot of countries right now.

             As recently as June 2008, President Bachelet and her Finance Minister, Andres Velasco, had the lowest approval ratings of any President or Finance Minister, respectively, since the return of democracy to Chile. (See graphs below.) There may have been multiple reasons for this, but perhaps the most important was popular resentment that the two had resisted intense pressure to spend the receipts from copper exports, which at the time were soaring along with world copper prices.  One year later, in the summer of 2009, the pair had the highest approval ratings of any President and Finance Minister since the return of democracy.  Why the change?  

   (more…)

This was to be expected.  It is an unseemly tooting of ones’ own horn, but –

“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.”

Although the phrase “carry trade” became widely popular in the context of currency speculation, where scholars know it as the “forward discount bias,” its etymological root is in commodity speculation.     Broadly speaking, the same phenomenon is observable in housing, equities, commercial bonds, and emerging markets:   when money is easy and nobody is worried about risk (2002-2005), the search for yield sends the excess liquidity surging out of the low-interest currencies, and into all other assets.    When the process reverses, investors pull out of the risky assets and retreat back to the safe haven of the low-interest-rate currencies.   Over the last six months, the reversal of this broadly-defined carry trade hit equities and bonds first, and then commodities (having hit housing earlier, of course).   This month it is finally hitting the high-interest-rate currencies.

In the 1955 movie version of East of Eden, the legendary James Dean plays Cal.  Like Cain in Genesis, he competes with his brother for the love of his father, a moralizing patriarch.   Cal “goes long” in the market for beans, in anticipation of an increase in demand if the United States enters World War I.  Sure enough, the price of beans goes sky high, Cal makes a bundle, and offers it to his father to make up money lost in another venture.  But the father is morally offended by Cal’s speculation, not wanting to profit from others’ misfortunes, and angrily tells him that he will have to “give the money back.” Cal has been the agent of Adam Smith’s famous invisible hand:   By betting on his hunch about the future, he has contributed to upward pressure on the price of beans in the present, thereby increasing the supply so that more is available precisely when needed (by the British Army).  The movie even treats us to a scene where Cal watches the beans grow in a farmer’s field, something real-life speculators seldom get to do.
 
Among politicians, pundits, and the public, many currently are trying to blame speculators for the recent boom in oil and other mineral and agricultural products.    Are the soaring prices their fault?

Sure, speculators are important in the commodities markets, more so than they used to be.  The spot prices of oil and other mineral and agricultural products — especially on a day-to-day basis — are determined in markets where participants typically base their supply and demand in part on their expectations of future increases or decreases in the price.    That is speculation.  But it need not imply bubbles or destabilizing behavior.

The evidence does not support the claim that speculation has been the source of, or has exacerbated, the price increases.   Indeed, expectations of future prices on the part of typical speculators, if anything, lagged behind contemporaneous spot prices in this episode.   Speculators have often been “net short” (sellers) on commodities rather than “long” (buyers).  In other words they may have delayed or moderated the price increases, rather than initiating or adding to them.  One revealing piece of evidence is that commodities that feature no futures markets have experienced as much volatility as those that have them.   Clearly speculators are the conspicuous scapegoat every time commodity prices go high.  But, historically, efforts to ban speculative futures markets have failed to reduce volatility.

One can distinguish three kinds of speculation in the face of rising prices.   First, there is the “bearer of bad tidings” like Cal in East of Eden.  The news that, in the future, increased demand will drive prices up is delivered by the speculator.  Not only would it be a miscarriage of justice to shoot the messenger, but the speculator is actually performing a social service, by delivering the right price signal that is needed to get real resources better in line with the future balance between supply and demand.  Without him, the subsequent price rise would be even greater, because supply would be less.    Most economists agree that speculators did not play this role in the commodity boom that started earlier this decade:  as already mentioned speculation, if anything, lagged behind the spot price.   (An exception, however, is Alan Greenspan, who told Krishna Guha of the Financial Times that speculators played precisely this role, moving forward and smoothing out what would have otherwise been an even sharper peak in prices.)

Second, when the price is topping out, stabilizing speculators can sell short in anticipation of a future decline to a lower equilibrium price.   This type of speculator again adds to the efficiency of the market, and dampens natural volatility, rather than adding to it.

Third, in some cases, when an upward trend has been going on for a few years, speculators sometimes jump on the bandwagon. Market participants begin simply to extrapolate past trends.  Self-confirming expectations create a speculative bubble, which carries the price well above its equilibrium.  The markets don’t always get it right.   Examples of previous speculative bubble peaks include the dollar in 1985, the Japanese stock and real estate markets in 1990, the yen in 1995, the NASDAQ in 2000, and the housing market in 2005.

It is the third kind of speculation, the destabilizing kind (also called bandwagon behavior), about which people tend to worry.    As noted, there is little evidence that destabilizing speculation has played a role in the 2001-2008 run-up of commodity prices.    So far, that is.   Just because the boom originated in fundamentals does not rule out that we could still go into a speculative bubble phase.    The aforementioned bubbles each followed on trends that had originated in fundamentals (respectively:  rising US real interest rates, 1980-84;  easy money and rapid growth in Japan, 1987-89;  US recession, 1990-91, and Japanese trade surpluses; the ICT boom in the late 1990s; and easy US monetary policy after 2001).  

It is not hard to identify in economic fundamentals the origins of this decade’s boom in commodity markets:  easy money in the US; rapid growth worldwide, but especially in China and India; instability among oil producers, especially in the Middle East; misguided ethanol subsidies; drought in Australia, etc., etc.  

[Any readers wishing to comment on this blog post: I suggest you go to the RGE version.]