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

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In 1980, Ronald Reagan successfully campaigned for the White House on a promise of smaller government. That promise proved to be empty, as US government deficits ballooned during his presidency. His enormous defence spending eventually exhausted the Soviet Union's ability to keep up, and it imploded amidst the popular dissatisfaction of its own people over the privations to which they had been subjected in the pursuit of dominance over the US. However, amidst the euphoria of the Wall Street boom of the 1980s and America's victorious emergence from the Cold War in the early 1990s, the US and the dollar appeared increasingly unassailable.

Reagan's free market ideology did not mean that his administration took an entirely hands-off approach to the dollar. His presidency witnessed growing domestic paranoia that Japan was poised to surpass the US economically. Following substantial dollar appreciation against other major currencies between 1980 and 1985, US manufacturers campaigned aggressively for government action to protect their export competitiveness. This led to the Plaza Accord in September 1985, under which the US entered into a joint agreement with France, West Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom (UK) to intervene in currency markets to force a depreciation of the dollar against the yen and the Deutschmark. Between 1985 and 1987, the dollar depreciated by around 50 percent against the yen.ssss1