Page created 24 December 1998. Last updated Saturday 9 January 1999, 9:15 AM.
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Number since 24 Dec 1998.
Semakin meluas tuntutan yang menghendaki adanya pengendalian aliran modal
Disamping itu gagasan untuk melahirkan kembali Bretton Woods dalam bentuk baru, guna mengatasi fluktuasi nilai tukar yang tidak terkendali, bermunculan disana-sini.
Bagaimana untung ruginya memilih nilai tukar mengambang murni, atau fixed rate yang paling mantap seperti CBS, atau unifikasi moneter seperti Euro?
Lihat juga:
Edisi Desember 1998
EURO: Dampaknya bagi Asia [Articles] (990107)
Kumpulan Pidato: Gagasan Otorita Moneter Internasional (Rev.981221)
Ilmu Ekonomi untuk Orang Awam (Rev.990109)
Edisi Oktober 1998
Riwayat Bantuan IMF
Hedge Fund LTCM
Kebijakan Pengendalian Devisa
Intervensi di Pasar Bebas
The Coming Fight over Capital Flows [Foreign Policy, Winter 1998/99]
by Robert Wade
Wade menguraikan adanya dua kubu, yaitu Amerika disatu pihak dengan Eropa dan Asia dipihak lain, yang saling bertentangan pendapat mengenai apa yang dimaksud dengan perombakan arsitektur keuangan dunia.
Amerika menghendaki transparansi, accountability dan penyusunan acuan standar yang berlaku global, melenyapkan "moral hazard", serta membebaskan aliran modal seluasnya.
Sedangkan negara-negara Eropa dengan didukung Asia, menekankan bahwa krisis Asia berakar dari liberalisasi keuangan besar-besaran sejak tahun 1990-an yang dijalankan atas desakan IMF.
Masyarakat Eropa dengan hati-hati menyarankan pembentukan arsitektur global yang baru dengan membagi dunia kedalam beberapa zona moneter, dimana masing-masing memiliki proteksi melalui pengendalian gerakan modal oleh pemerintahan yang berwenang.
Asian governments see capital controls as a way of buffering their economies from the instability caused by fast inflows and outflows. Malaysia has recently imposed capital controls and Japan's government has been considering doing the same. International Monetary Fund and U.S. officials expressed displeasure at these developments, also at Hong Kong's and Taiwan's introduction of restrictions on speculative currency trading.
This buffering is all the more important considering the relative lack of experience among most countries in the region in dealing with the international capital market and the thinness of banking regulation and supervision. In addition, the growing Asian sympathy for capital controls is based on the realization that Asian economies do not need to draw on the rest of the world's savings. They are the world's biggest savers saving about one-third of GDP. Finally, Asian perceptions of Asia's interests are colored by resentment of American triumphalism.
European political leaders have also been more prepared than their American counterparts to recognize the damage that volatile money has done in the Asian crisis and thus to support capital controls as an integral part of the new world financial architecture.
.....The differences in interests are real, and the United States-the U.S. Treasury, Wall Street, and multinational corporations-will resume pushing for free capital markets worldwide when the emergency passes. In the changed political landscape, however, it is by no means clear that the United States will win. Nor should it. The world is badly served by free capital flows.
Dead Ahead -- Monetary Meltdown [Washington Post Monday, December 21, 1998]
By Judy Shelton
The "architecture" of the international financial system must be overhauled to ensure that future global economic performance is not undermined by currency chaos.
Yet even as the IMF engages speculators on their own level, it proposes no solutions to the problem of money meltdown.
The World Bank has denounced the IMF for its misguided attempts to "protect" currencies by raising interest rates, which causes economic recession. But shoveling out billions in foreign reserves to artificially increase demand for a currency under pressure is no solution either. Nor is letting a nation's money become the latest profit opportunity for global currency players.
Prior to 1971, fixed exchange rates prevailed among national currencies. If you wanted to buy goods in a foreign country or make an investment, you had to exchange your currency for their currency. But all those foreign moneys were convertible into dollars at a fixed rate. Moreover, the dollar was convertible into gold at a fixed rate for foreign central banks. Indeed, the IMF was set up to oversee this mechanism, the Bretton Woods system, for governing international monetary relations.
If a new stable monetary regime is not established, it is difficult to imagine how the global economy can recover from depressed conditions or achieve increased prosperity. The U.S. trade deficit continues to reach record levels, but we cannot be "consumer of last resort" forever.
We need a new monetary system. We live in a global economy, we promote free trade and free capital flows -- so why do we limp along with a monetary nonsystem that not only is dysfunctional but dangerous?
The IMF shrinks from discussing international monetary reform -- perhaps out of fear of reminding people that its own justification for existence ended with the dissolution of the Bretton Woods system nearly three decades ago.
ROBERT CHOTE: Bretton Woods revisited [Financial Times, Dec 21 1998]
The events of recent months have underlined the importance of a holistic approach to crisis prevention and management: one that embraces macro-economics, financial sector reform, corporate governance and social policies.
The pressure for change has been felt most by the IMF, which has been criticised for (among many other things) lacking accountability and political legitimacy.
MARTIN WOLF: Currency vacuum [Financial Times Nov 4 1998]
There is a gaping hole at the centre of the G7's plan to prevent a recurrence of the recent financial crisis.
Artikel ini menegaskan bahwa upaya G7 telah menyusun agenda yang mengesankan, namun disesalkan tidak memasukkan suatu hal yang sangat penting, yaitu: menyarankan regim nilai tukar.
Emerging markets should be encouraged to adopt either of two extremes - either fairly freely floating regimes or robust currency boards, which fix a currency to an anchor, usually the dollar.
Exchange rate regimes matter. To understand why, one must start with the frightening number of banking crises and no less impressive number of currency crises over the last two decades.
The fiscal costs of such banking crises can range from 20 per cent to 40 per cent of gross domestic product. But a currency crisis imposes the additional trauma of a forced external adjustment.
Large quantities of foreign currency debt, unmatched by foreign currency assets of equivalent size and maturity, guarantee that a currency crisis will cause a banking collapse, and vice versa. Once the exchange rate falls, borrowers, particularly banks, will find their liabilities rising in value against their assets. Similarly, if the financial system begins to look infirm, foreign creditors will take their money out, thereby creating a currency crisis.
The G7's silence on exchange rate regimes is understandable, since the topic is so controversial. But it is a mistake. The choices should be debated now.
Confessions of a market heretic [The Australian Financial Review November 14, 1998]
by Brian Toohey
The Deputy Governor of the RBA, Stephen Grenville: faith in greater transparency of capital markets is 'naive'.
.....Grenville has emerged as one of the most forceful exponents of a view that sees problems endemic to international capital markets as being at least as important as the sins of individual countries.
.......He rejected the Efficient Market Hypothesis which is holy writ to many economists. For good measure, he also rejected the underlying premise that markets follow an equilibrium path with any deviations being corrected in a smooth and relatively painless fashion.
......According to [the speech by] Grenville, the degree of ignorance displayed by some fund managers "is so great as to border on the comic". But he does not accept claims that the problems of the capital markets can be fixed with more information. Instead, he describes faith in greater transparency as "naive"......
......."We need a framework which can cope with the inevitable imperfections of the policy process." Such a framework will have to involve some degree of market intervention because "the idea that private sector burrowers and lenders (consenting adults) will work things out satisfactorily has proved naive: the collateral damage is too great...."
......To cynics, Grenville's support for intervention in international capital markets can be explained by his natural predilections as a central banker. Central bankers owe their existence to their role of intervening in domestic money markets in order to set official interest rates in an effort to control inflation.
......After graduating in economics from Sydney University in 1965, he joined the Department of Foreign Affairs where he served in the Australian Embassy in Jakarta in 1969-70 and in Saigon in 1970-71. Along the way he completed a PhD on the Indonesian economy at the Australian National University. He returned to Indonesia -- a country for which he has great affection -- in 1977 as deputy head of the International Monetary Fund office.
......He is now sympathetic to those who regard the IMF as a sclerotic organisation which has badly misunderstood the nature of the crisis in Asia and Russia.No quick cures in sight for Asia's economic ills?
[The Autralian Financial Review November 14, 1998]
By Steve Burrell and Hans van Leeuwen
Speaking yesterday at the Credit Suisse First Boston economics conference in Sydney, Dr Krugman said the massive debt overhang in crisis-hit Asian economies like Thailand, South Korea and Indonesia, the incapacity of local companies to generate enough cash flow to restructure themselves and crippled domestic demand would see a prolonged period of economic stagnation in the region.
Dr Krugman paralleled the current situation in Asia with the Mexican crisis of the early 1980s, when there was a short, sharp economic collapse, followed by a partial recovery and then more than five years of stop-start growth and financial fragility.The Confidence Game [The New Republic, October 5, 1998]
by Paul Krugman
How Washington worsened Asia's crash.
Even in private, officials at the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. Treasury Department still think that they did the right thing on Asia and that their medicine will eventually work.....
.....But most people outside Washington's corridors of power are far less sanguine: they are all too aware that, at every point in this crisis, the real consequences of financial turmoil have been worse than anyone anticipated and that, in recent weeks, the crisis, far from being contained, has appeared to be spreading, especially to the hitherto largely immune economies of Latin America......
.....The human and economic costs of the slump are self-evident, as is the damage to Western influence. Less attention, however, has been paid to the effects of this crisis on the credibility of America's economic policy-making establishment.
.....Whatever one's views about the ultimate causes of the Asian crisis, the proximate cause--the shock that turned miracle into debacle--is not in dispute: the global capital market did it. Right up to the eve of the crisis, Asian economies could, in the eyes of people with money to invest, do no wrong.....
.....True, many of the investments made in Asia in recent years now look extremely foolish, and it seems only natural to conclude that they were the product of a deeply corrupt "crony" system--and that the massive loss of investor confidence in Asia was therefore wholly justified on that basis. But how sound would our own financial institutions look if we experienced a comparable loss of investor confidence? ......
.....If allowing free capital movement means that economic policy must play by the rules of the confidence game, sooner or later the world is going to decide that it is a game not worth playing.
Mendinginkan Uang Panas: Perlunya Pengawasan Modal
oleh Kavaljit Singh
Bab 11 dari buku Memahami Globalisasi Keuangan: Panduan Untuk Memperkuat Rakyat, Penerbit Yakoma-PGI, 1998; judul asli A Citizen Guide to the Globalization of Finance, Madhyam Books, 1998
Buku ini membahas secara luas kompleksitas proses globalisasi keuangan, dengan fokus pada meletusnya krisis ekonomi di Asia Timur serta Asia Tenggara, dan menjadi latar belakang yang perlu mendapat perhatian dalam langkah-langkah yang ditempuh India belakangan ini untuk membuka pintu bagi modal keuangan global.
Ditambah dengan Kata Pengantar dari Dr A Sonny Keraf, telah menempatkan pembahasan buku ini menjadi lebih tajam dan relevan dengan kasus Indonesia.
Preparing for International Capital Flows [USIA, Economic Perspectives, Aug 98]
by J. Bradford De Long, University of California at Berkeley
Pendulum arus modal yang terkontrol dan arus modal yang bergerak bebas, berayun kembali..... Setidaknya diperlukan sistem yang mendeteksi dan membatasi pinjaman luar negeri, lalu harus ada regulasi perbankan domestik yang efektif. Dan yang paling penting harus berperan sebuah institusi keuangan internasional yang mampu memberikan bantuan penyesuaian struktural bagi negara yang membutuhkannya dalam keadaan mendesak, mengikuti perubahan sentimen investor yang cepat.
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Page created 24 December 1998. Last updated Saturday 9 January 1999, 9:15 AM.
Produced with Webford 2.01.
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