Central bankers debate risks from withdrawing global liquidity

JACKSON HOLE, Wyoming (Reuters) – Global financial stability is at risk as central banks draw back from ultra-easy policies that have flooded the world with cash, because emerging markets lack defenses to prevent potentially huge capital outflows, top officials were warned on Saturday.

Central bankers from around the world, devoting the second day at their annual Jackson Hole policy retreat to the threats posed by global liquidity, heard two academic papers on the challenges, sparking a debate on actions and on coordination.

Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda told the audience, which included top officials from advanced as well as emerging economies, that the bold measures he had championed to spur his nation’s moribund economy were bearing fruit.

“The bank’s [policy] has already started to exert its intended effects,” Kuroda said. The Bank of Japan has embarked on an aggressive bond-buying campaign to lift inflation in his country to 2 percent.

Easy-money policies used to depress interest rates in Japan, Europe and the United States had sparked a flood of capital into emerging markets as investors sought higher returns.

Now, however, the US Federal Reserve has said it plans to reduce its bond-buying stimulus by year-end, with an eye toward drawing it to a close by mid-2014.

Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President Dennis Lockhart made clear that tapering could begin next month, provided the economic news between now and then was not dramatically bad.

“I can get comfortable with September, providing we don’t get any really worrisome signals out of the economy between now and the 18th of September,” he told Reuters in an interview, referring to the Fed’s next meeting, which is on September 17-18.

Concerns over Fed tapering has sparked an exodus of cash from emerging markets, including India and Brazil, whose currencies and stock markets suffered steep losses last week.

“Amplifications, feedback loops and sensitivity to risk perceptions will complicate the task of exit and necessitate very close and constant dialogue and cooperation between central banks,” Jean-Pierre Landau, a former deputy governor of the Bank of France, warned in his presentation.

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Turkish Central Bank Governor Erdem Basci attended the conference, but his Brazilian counterpart, Alexandre Tombini, canceled to stay home and deal with the crisis.

Tombini was replaced in Jackson Hole by his deputy, Luiz Pereira, who argued that a tapering of the Fed’s bond purchases might actually be a net benefit for emerging economies if it signaled that the US economy was picking up steam. A stronger US should spell stronger demand for exports from emerging economies, including Brazil.

Landau argued that central banks in advanced economies had cooperated successfully during the 2007-2009 financial crisis, when they coordinated on interest-rates cuts and set up currency-swap lines. As a result, they could do so again in the future with an eye toward moderating the spillovers from their actions.

But he acknowledged it would be difficult to get agreement to subordinate national priorities in advance, a point echoed by others.

“How much should domestic monetary policy restrain itself for the stability of global [conditions]?” asked Allan Meltzer, a Fed historian and professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “That’s a fundamental problem for monetary policy.”

Lockhart said the Fed had a legal obligation to focus on domestic US goals, but allowed that there could be circumstances when the international impact of its actions could be taken into account.

“If a policy maker in the United States believed that the global consequences of taking a domestic action would spill back over into the US economy in a very negative way, that clearly is within the scope of consideration,” he said in the interview.

There was also discussion about the need for emerging-market nations to develop tools to control credit flows. Without such tools, these countries could lose the ability to control domestic financial conditions with monetary policy.

But Terrence Checki of the New York Fed cautioned that monetary policy may not be the best way to deal with financial excesses, and others said domestic priorities should not be subordinated to international obligations.

Don Kohn, a former Fed vice chairman and a candidate for the top job when Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s term ends in January, countered the claim that monetary policy might be too loose globally, citing elevated jobless rates in rich countries.

“One of the ways that monetary policy of the United States was transmitted was by resistance to exchange-rate appreciation in other countries,” he said, voicing a familiar Fed argument that emerging economies could better absorb easy US policy if they allowed their own exchange rates to fluctuate.