Friday, November 05, 2010

The US Federal Reserve is going to inject a further $ 600 billion into the US economy by means of Quantitative Easing. This is causing enormous heartburn in many countries because they fear that a lot of this money will be invested in their economies strengthening their currencies and harming exports. Brazil already taxes foreign investments, Japan is considering its own quantitative easing and Korea is mulling what its response is going to be. Part of the problem is that China has a virtually fixed rate against the dollar and the falling value of the dollar is making Chinese goods even cheaper compared to those of others. The IMF and World Bank are warning against tit for tat devaluations resulting in ' currency wars.' Only India is sanguine. More than $ 20 billion dollars have come into the Indian share market which is poised to hit record levels and the rupee is now less than 44 to the dollar. But the government is completely undisturbed. Firstly, India's economy is mainly domestic and exports are less than 20% of the economy so no problem. Secondly, all the other countries run a current account surplus whereas we always have a deficit so an inflow of dollars is welcome. Thirdly the strong rupee decreases the bill for imports such as oil. Fourth, the stratospheric stock market gives the government a chance to sell off parts of public sector companies at huge valuations. Problem is that all this liquidity puts a spanner in the efforts of the RBI to contain inflation and an uncontrollable asset price bubble. The good thing is that inspite of having zillions of Nobel Prize winning economists the US could not stop the dot com or the sub prime crises. So who cares.

No comments: