Zahlungsbilanzstruktur, Leitwährungsfunktion und die Zukunft des Dollars

Balance-of-Payments Pattern, Reserve-Currency Function and the Future of the US Dollar The quality of a currency as an instrument for safeguarding the value of property may be expressed by the expected ups and downs of its exchange rate. In the last analysis, this quality depends on the relative scarcity of money and, thus, on the national government’s monetary policy. By contrast, there is not of necessity any such relation between net current-balance deficits/surpluses and the quality of a currency as an instrument for safeguarding the value of property. Reserve currencies are atthetop of the international monetary hierarchy and represent the best instrument for keeping the value of property stable. Current-balance deficits run by reserve-currency countries may reflect an international interest in holding the currency concerned. Reservecurrency countries’ deficits on current account stabilize a monetary system since they take the explosives out from a mercantilistic zero-sum game played by non-reservecurrency countries. However, reserve-currency countries are in a position to overexploit their functions by contracting external debts in their own currencies and by subsequently devaluing their currencies. In spite of the fact that the USA’s role has lost in weight in relative terms, internationally, the US dollar will continue to be the number-one currency in the world for quite some time to come. The US dollar’s instability since the 1970s is indicative not so much of the erosion of the international role of the dollar, but of the overexploitation of the US dollar’s reserve-currency function through a policy of “benign neglect” pursued by the US Governmen