Category Archives: international cooperation

No Mar-a-Lago Accord

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March 23, 2025 — What is to be made of proposals for a “Mar-a-Lago Accord” coming from some Trump devotees, notably Stephen Miran?  (He is the new Chair of President Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers.)

Sometime during the next 3 years and 10 months, Trump could well find some event that he will want to trumpet under the name of his Florida residence.   But the Mar-a-Lago Accord about which people are talking, regarding the dollar, doesn’t stand a chance.

  1. The return of international coordination?

The proposal comprises an effort, coordinated among large countries, to intervene to depreciate the dollar, in hopes of improving the US trade balance. That much resembles the successful 1985 Plaza Accord, which is said to be its inspiration.
One could imagine a sensible proposal for concerted intervention to bring down the dollar from its height, coordinated with American steps to cut its budget deficit and steps by Germany and China to increase their budget deficits, thus helping to address the fundamental causes of the international trade imbalances. But this is not that. read more

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Let the WTO Referee Carbon Border Tariffs

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December 2, 2022 — The most important task in confronting global climate change is the need to enforce serious quantitative limits on Greenhouse Gas emissions, such as the Nationally Defined Contributions which were originally negotiated in the 2015 Paris Agreement.  The 27th Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC,  which concluded in Sharm-el-Sheikh November 20, did not tackle this task.  Carbon border equalization measures, including tariffs against carbon-intensive imports from lax countries, might supply the teeth that have been missing from such agreements.  But they also risk advancing protectionism, which would ultimately slow the needed global energy transition.  Adjudicating the fairness of carbon tariffs would be a good job for a reinvigorated WTO. read more

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Get Ready for “Reverse Currency Wars”

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May 28, 2022  — The US dollar is up 12 % against the euro over the last year.  Having moved from 1.21 $/€ in May 2021 to 1.07 $/€ today, the exchange rate seems to be approaching one-to-one parity for the first time.  Europeans are not happy about it. If you think that prices for oil and other commodities are high now in terms of dollars, you should see what they look like in terms of euros.  Get ready for “reverse currency wars.”

The regular sort of currency wars featured countries feeling aggrieved that their trading partners were deliberately pursuing policies to weaken their own currencies.  The feared motive would be gaining unfair advantage in international trade.  The original phrase “currency wars” was a colorful description of what international economists had (more informatively) long called “competitive devaluations” or, when exchange rates float, “competitive depreciation.” read more

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