Since the inception of floating exchange rates among the major countries at the beginning of 1970s, the frequency of occurrence in economic crisis has increased tremendously. That is why the world economy has been conducted by the debtor’s logic not by the creditor’s one, in addition to fundamental unstableness of the world economy by the large swings of the exchange rates. Under the fixed exchange rate regime, the strong balance of payments discipline is imposed on the deficit countries (debtors) . In this sense fixed exchange rate regime is the system conducted by the creditor’s logic. On the other hand, floating exchange rates is the system conducted by the debtor’s logic. This system could never work well.
If we look at the European sovereign debt crisis in Greece and Portugal, the root cause is each country’s balance of payments problem although it appears fiscal problem on the surface. They continued huge current account deficits of around 10 % of their GDP for more than 10 years, because their balance of payments discipline was completely disappeared since the introduction the euro. This is more than outrageous. This could make possible for them to keep huge fiscal deficit which is a part of current account of balance of payments. Moreover, the two countries disguised their fiscal balance statistics for many years. After all, balance of payments on current account is one of the most important macro-economic indicators under any currency system including even floating exchange rates. This should be clearly recognized in all countries in the world.
Credit rating agencies like Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s repeatedly made mistakes in every major crisis, such as Asian Currency Crisis in 1997, Enron Corp. collapse in 2001, Worldcom collapse in 2002, and US Sub-prime Housing Loan Crisis in 2007. This is due to the system based on issuer-pays model or debtor-pays model which brings conflict of interest. Thus the current world economic system is basically constructed by the debtor’s logic. That is the fundamental reason why we would encounter economic and financial crises very frequently. And, we should pay attention to the fact that the United States and the United Kingdom obviously had much more banking crises than other major countries for the past 200 years. Economies conducted by freemarketeers’ mantra are prone to face economic crises.
The solution to the world economy is that countries should follow the Germano-Japanese economic model rather than the Anglo-Saxon model. In other words, we should re-construct the world economic system conducted by the creditor’s logic. Japan has been the largest net external creditor for 22 years since 1991, and Germany is the third largest net external creditor only after China.
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