“The currency wars declared by Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega are proving more a battle to salvage economic growth than a spiral of competitive devaluations.
While the yen and pound slide on the prospect central banks will intensify stimulus and South Korea’s won and Chile’s peso strengthen, volatility in the currency market is below its average of the past decade and global stocks have gained $2.15 trillion since the start of 2013. Policy makers reduced intervention over the past 12 months as foreign reserves grew at the slowest pace in four years, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
Even Mantega, who used war terminology in 2010 to criticize industrialized nations for policies that weakened their exchange rates, says he is abandoning efforts to push down the real. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and other policy makers signaled last week that currencies are a corollary, not a cornerstone, of policies to boost growth from unacceptably low levels, paving the way for what Morgan Stanley calls a third round of “Great Monetary Easing.”
“Central banks are going to throw the kitchen sink at reviving growth and spurring inflation because the alternative to that is deflation,” Neil Williams, head of economic research at London-based Hermes Fund Managers, which oversees about $42 billion, said in a phone interview on Feb. 27. “The countries that have overall loosened their policies most have had the weakest currencies. It’s not a blatant attempt to out-grow others, it’s just a case of all countries trying to do the same thing at the same time.”
