The past week has seen an escalating series of news stories about a looming "currency war," as country after country tries to drive their currency downward, the United States blames China as the source of original sin on this, and China pisses off yet another country responds by digging in its heels, and the IMF wrings its hands.

If you need to read one article on why things are going down the way they are, it's Alan Beattie's excellent survey in the Financial Times of how countries as responding to this situation: 

Washington is looking for allies -- particularly among the emerging economies, who complain about their own competitiveness and volatility problems -- in its campaign for exchange rate flexibility. Trying to take on Beijing single-handed makes the US vulnerable to the charge that it is a lone complainant blaming its own profligate shortcomings on the country that is kind enough to lend it money, holding the best part of $1,000bn in U.S. Treasury bonds…

Yet despite U.S. claims of broad support, backing appears sporadic…

[S]ome U.S. policymakers privately complain that European backing is patchy and tends to go up and down with the euro. In the first half of the year the euro was pushed lower by the gathering Greek crisis, by early summer falling 17 per cent below its January level. Focused on local difficulties, and with the German export machine powering ahead, European officials saw little need to take on Beijing over currencies and had little energy to do so… 

Across the emerging economies, the plan of attack seems to be to keep quiet and pass the ammunition. Despite widespread recognition of the distortions China’s exchange rate policy appear to be causing, governments have generally preferred unilateral in­tervention to a public slanging match.

True, in April the governors of the Reserve Bank of India and the Central Bank of Brazil complained that Beijing was hurting their exporters.

But recently Celso Amorim, Brazil’s foreign minister, told Reuters: "I be­lieve that this idea of putting pressure on a country is not the right way for finding solutions." Significantly, he added: "We have good co-ordination with China and we’ve been talking to them. We can’t forget that China is currently our main customer…"

With the prospect of diplomatic progress limited, currency policy in the U.S. and Europe may end up being conducted through domestic monetary policy. If, as seems possible, the U.S. Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan and the European Central Bank return to quantitative easing in order to boost growth, their currencies are likely to weaken -- as the yen briefly did after the Bank of Japan’s announcement of looser monetary policy this week.

So, to sum up: 

1) Every country is free-riding/buckpassing on this issue, hoping that the United States can dislodge China on its own.

2) The international regimes designed to prevent free-riding like this -- namely the G-20 and the IMF -- are not up to this task. [What about the WTO? -- ed. Fuggedaboutit.]

3) The source of China's rising power is not its hard currency reserves or its command over scarce rare earths, but its burgeoning domestic market.

4) Ironically, the United States and other countries want China to accelerate the growth of its domestic market, which would in turn give it more power. Even more ironically, China doesn't want to do this right now.

5) The sum effect of all of this will be a series of uncoordinated interventions into currency markets that will increase market volatility, political posturing, and eventually lead to the erection of capital and/or trade controls. 

Developing… in a very disturbing manner. 

Over at the Financial Times, Gideon Rachman looks back at the G-20 Pittsburgh summit and thinks that Europe will take over the G-20 process: 

The realisation that the G20 is Europe’s Trojan horse struck me at the G20’s last summit in Pittsburgh a couple of weeks ago. The surroundings and atmosphere were strangely familiar. And then I understood; I was back in Brussels, and this was just a global version of a European Union summit.

It was the same drill and format. The leaders’ dinner the night before the summit; a day spent negotiating an impenetrable, jargon-stuffed communiqué; the setting-up of obscure working groups; the national briefing rooms for the post-summit press conferences.

All of these procedures are deeply familiar to European leaders – but rather new to the Asian and American leaders whom the Europeans are carefully entangling in this new structure. Watching an Indonesian delegate wandering, apparently carefree, through the conference centre in Pittsburgh, I felt a stab of pity. “You don’t know what you are getting into,” I thought. “You are going to waste the rest of your life talking about fish quotas.” (Or, this being the G20, carbon-emission quotas.)

The Europeans did not just set the tone at the G20 – they also dominate proceedings, since they are grossly over-represented. Huge countries such as Brazil, China, India and the US are represented by one leader each. The Europeans managed to secure eight slots around the conference table for Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, the president of the European Commission and the president of the European Council. Most of the key international civil servants present were also Europeans: Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund; Pascal Lamy of the World Trade Organisation; Mario Draghi of the Financial Stability Board.

As a result, the Europeans seemed much more tuned into what was going on than some of the other delegations. Puzzling over the new powers given to the IMF to monitor national economic policies in the Pittsburgh conclusions, I was interrupted by an old friend from the European Commission, who recognised the language immediately. “Ah yes,” she said, “the open method of co-ordination.”

Hmmm..... no, I'm not buying this.  Or, to put it another way, if the G-20 is a European plot, then it would be the worst plot since.... insert your least favorite M. Night Shyalaman film here.

Sure, the Europeans are overrepresented at the G-20.  But compare that to the G-8, where (when you factor in the EU), they occupied more than half of the chairs around the table.  The G-20 doesn't augment the power of Europe -- it dilutes it. 

This interpretation fits with what I heard from some of the G-20 participants as well.  There was a surprising degree of common cause between the BRIC economies and the United States in the run-up to Pittsburgh.  Given the outcome, there is an obvious explanation for the BRIC economies' behavior. 

Why did the U.S. go along?  Washington maintains stronger bilateral ties with each of the other G-20 members than most do with each other.  If one thinks of the United States as the central node in a more networked governance arrangement, then one can see how the reforms made to date do not weaken American influence.  The primary loser, then, is Europe.

Maybe Gideon will be proven correct -- it's certainly true that the Europeans might have a comparative advantage in this kind of diplomatic death-by-detail approach.  On the other hand, the Americans and Russians aren't exactly newbies at this.  The Chinese and Indians have been moving down the learning curve pretty fast.  And the Brazilians already have a reputation for being diplomats who punch above their weight. 

Developing....