Forum Archive Index - February 2004

[hugh webber <hugh.webber@clear.net.nz>]

Wrong target old chap - there's plenty of economists who 
have successfully traded currencies - how about Keynes himself?
I expect you'll find that most curreny traders in the US these days 
have economics degrees.

I thought the statement that Asian currencies have artificially pegged 
their currencies too low was a pretty fair statement. How about China 
(both Mainland and Taiwan), both have absolutely huge overseas 
reserves, Japan, Malaysia (whose defense to the Asian crisis in recent 
years was to freeze most currency transactions and peg its currency), 
India which still has most overseas currency capital transactions pegged 
and huge and growing overseas reserves. Hong Kong is pegged against the 
US dollar at too low a rate.
The rest don't really matter unless you are into silly stuff like Burma/Myanmar,
Bhutan, Indonesia (its effective economy is relatively small given the huge 
inefficiencies, corruption, currency devaluations since they took over from 
the Dutch), Nepal &.
The two exceptions I might grant you are South Korea and Thailand which 
are both struggling to keep their exchange rates down....

Until these Asian economies liberalise properly incl Japan there's going 
to be a huge struggle and liberalised economies such as the US are going 
to be trying to manage their exchange rates down to compete with them.

There's only the odd country which has managed to cope with a continually rising
exchange rate by means of increasing efficiency - Germany is the main 
example and it seems to have come to the end of that road about now.
Maybe Switzerland, Sweden and Finland are the others.

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