January 26, 2009

Helicopters and money

This maybe misinformed, but would the 'money out of helicopters' solution help ease the currency crisis in the Eurozone? If there wasn't an ongoing credit crisis I would think yes. But adding that sort of monetary instability would probably worsen the credit crisis as much as it would ease the currency one.

Economist notes:
One thing you can probably get 99% of economists to agree on is that a global trade war in the middle of a global recession is a bad idea. If every country increases import tariffs, hoping to protect its domestic industry from foreign competition, global trade will fall in all directions, hurting everybody. Put another way, increased tariffs are a negative-sum game.

To date, we haven’t seen much in the way of higher trade barriers during this crisis… however, we are seeing friction over currency valuations… the other side of competitive currency devaluations is that not all countries are equally well armed. In particular, countries that use the euro cannot devalue their currencies, because they don’t control their monetary policy and they don’t have the scale to intervene significantly on the market for euros. In short, other countries can devalue their currencies at the expense of Eurozone members

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