Читать книгу Financial Cold War. A View of Sino-US Relations from the Financial Markets онлайн

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In reality, de Gaulle was not entirely accurate when he suggested that the US did not bear a cost for its exorbitant privilege. Post-war recovery meant that European and Japanese exports had begun competing with US manufactures and this was already eroding America's share of global manufacturing, but there is little doubt that the overvalued dollar was accelerating this process. By the 1970s, this would be manifested in rising US unemployment.

As early as 1962, British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan suggested to JFK halving the rate at which the dollar could be converted into gold to $70 per ounce. However, even if Kennedy had acted on that suggestion, it would have merely deferred the problem of inadequate gold reserves and would have done nothing to address the issue of falling US export competitiveness. This is because, under Harry White's system, the values of all other currencies had been fixed against the dollar.

At the heart of the matter was a fundamental conflict that persists to this day: the US desire for balance of payments equilibrium is incompatible with the dollar's role as a global currency and the consequent need to supply dollar liquidity to the whole world. This conflict created by the Bretton Woods system was first identified in the 1950s by Belgian-American economist Robert Triffin and has come to be known as the ‘Triffin Dilemma’. It was not possible for the US to simultaneously issue enough dollars to satisfy the trading needs of the entire world and maintain a fixed exchange rate against gold. For one thing, as Keynes had pointed out in the 1930s, new supplies of gold were not keeping pace with the growth in the economy and in trade. And to keep the world supplied with sufficient dollar liquidity, the US must continue to run a balance of payments deficit. Failure to do so would starve the rest of the world of dollars and precipitate a liquidity crunch similar to the one in gold that had contributed to the Great Depression (see ssss1 for further discussion).