Perry Mehrling on Trump's Echoes of the Nixon Shock
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Hey there, Odd Lots listeners. The following episode was recorded May 2nd on the Princeton campus. Obviously, some things have changed since then, but I still think it's a very interesting and relevant conversation. So take a listen. Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news. ♪

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Traci Alloway. And I'm Joe Wiesenthal. Joe, do you feel like you are hearing the term exorbitant privilege a lot more than you used to? Yes. Is that a loaded question? Maybe it is. Yes.

You heard it a lot, you know, large budget deficits, right? Those were explainable or people claimed that they were explainable because of something called exorbitant privilege. I've never totally known what that term means, but obviously with some of the policy volatility in the United States, which is a very nice way of putting it, you hear it again and whether it can last or whether it can be exhausted. So I had the same reaction to you. I started thinking about it, like, why are we hearing this over and over again? And then I was curious about

when we first started using that term. And I think to your point about what exactly this means, we first started using it in the 1960s and sort of going into the early 1970s. Yes. And it was this idea that because we had built the financial system around the U.S. dollar,

vis-a-vis Bretton Woods, which we've talked about on the show, that the U.S. was in this, you know, privileged position where it felt like people in other countries were basically subsidizing the U.S. lifestyle. The constraints that typical countries might face in terms of spending don't, to the same extent, seem to apply to the United States. In general, when it comes to talk about the dollar...

I find that there's just a lot of sloppy definitions thrown around. People talk about dollar strength, but they're not always clear whether they're talking about dollar euro as an exchange rate or dollar share of transactions or dollar share in reserves or the global reserve currency or the global safe haven assets. Lots of

fuzzy defined terms that unsatisfy. That's totally fair. I don't get as mad at fuzzy terms because we don't have all day. Like, do we have to define everything into like obsolescence? No. But anyway, speaking of someone who probably also doesn't like fuzzy terms, to your point, we have the perfect guest to talk about all of this. And I guess a big moment that keeps coming up on our show quite a few times over recent episodes, and that is the Nixon shock.

The Nixon shock, right? Because people look at the tariffs that Trump announced on April 2nd and the reach for historical analogies about the changing relationship between the U.S. and the rest of the world, in part via trade, in part via currency. And so much to mine from the past. So we have the perfect guest and we're actually at the perfect event to do this as well. So we're at Princeton University.

That's right. We came down here. We did a podcast, which either if you're listening to this, either it's going to come out or you'll have already heard it, depending on the sequence. We're at a conference. Brendan Greeley invited us down, a conference on currencies and what is a currency and so forth. How to write a biography of a currency. That's the name of the conference. So anyway, yes, a perfect guest at the perfect context to talk about the dollar. Okay, so...

We do have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with he's a longtime Outlaws guest. Yes. Although he hasn't been on for a while. Yeah. We're speaking with Perry Merling, a professor of international political economy at the Party School of Global Studies over at Boston University. Perry, thank you for coming back on the show. Happy to be here. Great to catch up with you in person. OK, I'm just going to jump in with the exorbitant privilege question because this keeps coming up.

Is the U.S. dollar's role in the global financial system a net positive or a net negative for the country? Well, I guess it depends on who you ask. Yes, for sure. This exorbitant privilege thing, OK, was coming from Europe. OK, so clearly Europe, France in particular, was viewing this as a net positive for the United States and a negative for themselves.

But in the United States, there was coming to be a view that it was a net negative, that it was an exorbitant burden. And that, in fact, that something about being the international reserve currency was getting in the way of our manufacturing development and overvaluing our exchange rate. And that became a theory that was accepted by the political forces. Just to be clear, we're talking in the 1960s. Correct. A French politician, I think, who first said that term. I think it was Giscard de Seine.

But the important point is that the view from one side of the Atlantic and the view from the other side of the Atlantic were quite different. So, yes, let me take you back to the 60s. One way to understand Bretton Woods, 1944, was that this was a pass-off from Sterling pre-World War I to the dollar to build the post-World War II international monetary system. Okay.

OK. And so the bankers in New York thought, oh, that's just great. You know, New York will become like London. London had been the center of the world money market, the center of the world capital market with sterling before World War One. And all the bankers knew that. And they had been chomping at the bit to do this for a long time. OK.

OK, so that's what they thought they were doing in building up during the 50s. But in the 60s, there started to be political resistance in the United States and the United States government started to put taxes on people who came from abroad to float bonds. And and they tried to prevent it from happening. They tried to prevent from happening. This is sort of American politics that Americans are very suspicious of finance. Probably you know that.

Especially globalist financiers, right? You see that even now.

But the denouement of all of this was 1971, okay? August 15th, actually, 1971, when Richard Nixon took the dollar off gold, which was the promise that had been made at Bretton Woods, and increased tariffs by 10%. This was intended as leverage for forcing our allies to revalue their currencies. So if you have the view that the dollar is overvalued because it's a reserve currency, you can force your allies to revalue their currency. So that happened.

actually, in December of that same year, 1971. The yen went up and there wasn't euro then. So this is August 15th, 1971. The reason I go through this in some detail is that I think that the current events, the events of the last decade

Is it only two months? Okay. Yeah, two months. Are quite analogous to what is going on. Okay. And in fact, some of the theories that were around back then have been re-emerged, you know, and so it's as if no time has gone by. Okay. And Mr. Trump is replaying the Nixon handbook, but

times 10 because he's doing much more tariffs. Of course, the world is much bigger than this was really just a U.S. versus Europe spat. OK, you know, even, you know, getting Japan to revalue was not such a big Japan was not a big player yet in 1971. You know, Europe was the main object

of this. And the pound sterling and the French franc and the Deutsche Mark, you know, they were separate currencies at that time. The euro had not just happened. So the world is now much more global. And so it's quite a different kind of a shock. It's a much more comprehensive shock. I think Nixon playbook times 10 is a very promising headline. I literally just wrote it down. It's a very promising headline for this

episode. I'm just curious, the premise that the dollar is this global reserve asset,

leads to an overvaluation? You know, a country cares about overvaluation because it wants to have competitive exports, or that seems to be one theory. Does that actually bear out in the facts? Because when I, you know, as I sort of said in the intro, you can talk about a dollar strength in terms of its reserve status or trade status or dollar yen, dollar euro. Is there actually a stable relationship between the dollar share value

of X versus the exchange rate? Well, this is a debate among economists, and there's empirical studies on both sides. I incline to say no, okay? And in particular, no now.

OK, because so much of the dollar system is offshore. So you can get dollar reserves if you want, you know, by having a euro dollar deposit in France, you know, that is not touching the U.S. shores at all. So some of this argument, you know, is outdated. You know, that the globalization of the dollar, the fact that the U.S. refused to make New York into London has led the world to become a dollar system. And so I don't know that those arguments work correctly.

quite so well. I'm not sure those people who are making them, you know, have paid attention to the way in which the world has changed since 1971. Well, speaking of what changed after 1971, there's one more historical question that I want to ask you. And please forgive me for not remembering this from your book. But Charles Kindleberger, what did he think was going to happen after Nixon unveiled all his policies? So he was very worried about this.

because he had just finished this book, The World in Depression, that made the argument that when sterling was forced off gold in September of 1931, that the failure to do the pass off to the dollar at that time meant that there was no world currency and so there was a collapse of world trade and we had world depression.

And the reason he calls it the crime of 1971 is that, in fact, the U.S. was not forced off of gold. This was a decision by the president to just abrogate these agreements. So he felt this was a failure of responsibility that was just wrongheaded and it came out of nowhere and there was no reason to do this. But Nixon was very clear about this, that he saw the dollar system emerging and he just wanted to kill it. And it was America first and he wanted to kill it. And

As I say, the bankers wouldn't let him, but that's a little bit longer story. But that's not what happened, right? We didn't have deflation. We had inflation in the mid-1970s. And we saw the rest of the financial system sort of expand to absorb what had been lost through the Nixon crime. I'm doing air quotes here. He certainly didn't kill the dollar system. He did not kill the dollar system. It took a while to put it back together again.

I grew up in the 70s. I think I'm a little older than you. I was in high school in the 70s, and it was not a pleasant time to be alive. Stagflation. You've heard the word stagflation. Yes. So where you have unemployment and inflation at the same time. And it was about, there was a breakdown of the international monetary system. The story, the important date for...

for that is maybe 1973, because I haven't filled in the rest of it, that after the stabilization of exchange rates in December of 1971, the revaluation of the yen, as I say, Nixon took advantage of that new fixed exchange rate to try to get himself reelected by leaning on the Fed to lower interest rates. And the Fed did lower interest rates, but the rest of the world did not.

And so now you have a real problem because with a fixed exchange rate, you have free money by borrowing in dollars at a low rate and lending in Deutschmarks in Germany. And the central bank of Germany has to defend the exchange rate. And so they have to absorb all of this. And they did.

until they couldn't or decided not to. And so after 73, there was just floating exchange rates. And so I think that is a kind of incipient breakdown of the international monetary system where you don't have stable exchange rates. And Kinderberger thought...

that that could be a replay of the hot money periods of the 1930s, where speculators would say, I need to be safe. Oh, I should be in the pound sterling. And then they would say, no, I think maybe the pound sterling is going to devalue. I have to be in the French franc. No. And as a consequence, they're destabilizing all the exchange rates. And with the exchange rates fluctuating like that, how can you plan? So it basically broke down capital flows.

short-term capital flows, long-term capital flows, trade. So the whole thing broke down. And so he was afraid that that would happen. But it didn't happen because the bankers wouldn't let it. And in particular, the BIS played an important role in providing currency swaps for countries that were under attack. They were taking the opposite side of some of these trades.

And gradually, we built what we now experience as the offshore dollar system, where there's dollars borrowing and lending offshore. Doesn't touch New York at all. That happened during the 1970s as a consequence of these policy actions in 71 and 73. And by 1979, when Volcker comes, this is the time when the United States is now taking responsibility again, OK?

And you now have the infrastructure, you know, where it is offshore. OK, so maybe it's more politically acceptable than it was in the 60s. And then we go to the races. You know, it takes a little while for the, you know, go to the races, double, double digit interest rates at 20 percent interest rates. I remember that, too. You know, I was in college then and taking out student loans.

And so it wasn't until 1985 at Plaza where the rest of the world sort of they actually agreed to some parodies and so forth. But the system got put back together again. That's the story. And I think maybe that's a hopeful story for this moment. The Nixon Playbook. And here we have a specimen from the early 2000s, a legacy investing platform.

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Before we get to the current moment, this is just a theoretical question. When you look at the world economy, either in the past or specifically now,

Does it inevitably tend towards sort of like one dominant currency? I mean, you know, and there's obviously countries hold other currencies, too. They hold euros and they had some Swiss franc probably and maybe a little gold, et cetera. But is there a tendency towards like a power law distribution where one typically becomes the currency kind of like in social networking? It's like there's Facebook. I don't think that's the right analogy. Power law distribution. I know. I know what you're talking about there. Yeah.

There is a tendency, but it comes from sort of efficiency in exchange. Okay. Kindleberger always made the analogy that before we had the Fed, there was not par clearing between California and New York. Right. So that was itself a sort of tax on trade inside the United States. And you weren't really sure how it was going to work. And there wasn't par check clearing and so forth.

And with the creation of the Fed and with war finance, that all went away and we got park clearing. So he was always impressed by the analogy. If this was a good idea for the United States, maybe we should do this for the world as well. And he saw, as I said, this hot money. When you have multiple key currencies, you are inviting speculation. So you're destabilizing the exchange rates and therefore that's a tax on trade and on capital flows. You don't want to do that. Okay.

Now, the analogy with the United States, you know, in retrospect, went too far because he was a big advocate of fixed exchange rates. And it seems like that's a bridge too far. That's too demanding. So we do not have fixed exchange rates. We have managed floating exchange rates that are managed through joint intervention of sort of the club of six, the major central banks. This is another Kinderberger point, that if you stabilize the core of the system, then you stabilize the system as a whole. Hmm.

that there will always be countries that are facing crises and so forth. But as long as you stabilize the core, you'll be all right. The system as a whole will be all right. That's why the global financial crisis was such a problem, because that came from the core. It threatened the

You may remember. I don't know if you were doing odd lots yet then. Not quite, but we both got our starting journalism in 2008. You're a financial journalist. And they thought the world was going to come to an end, and that was the end of the dollar and all of that. But in fact, what happened was the expansion of the dollar system to the global south because of zero interest rates in the north. And so this offshore dollar system that, as I was saying, was given a big boost by the Nixon shock of 1971. In retrospect, as I say, it was not pleasant to live through, okay?

was given a big boost by the global financial crisis. And now we have the Trump shock that's happening. And so I think that the lesson of history may be that

the bankers won't let them. But it's going to be painful. It's not going to be pleasant. But I do not think that the dollar system is going away. I guess the obvious question to ask after that is, OK, we have these other moments in time where there was a crisis in the dollar system, and yet it came back stronger. And I guess the question is,

Is Trump different to the policymakers that were in charge at that particular time? He seems much more interested and willing in trying very, very new things and potentially destroying some really, really big things. Is he going to want to maintain that system? I'm thinking, you know, something specific like the dollar swap lines. You can imagine the headlines saying,

If the Fed is extending billions of dollars to Europe or something, imagine how Trump would feel about headlines about Americans bailing out Europe or something like that. Yes. So this is another thing that is different today than it was back then. As I say, Arthur Burns caved in.

to Mr. Nixon, helped him try to get reelected. Economists know this, and it's a shameful episode at the Fed, you know, that that should never be so. That should never be so. So what we're seeing play out right now is quite a different drama, okay? Mr. Powell is not caving in. Mr. Powell is very publicly going and saying the liquidity swap lines are in place,

And I am not lowering interest rates, okay, until I see that the inflationary effects of these tariffs are not going to undermine our economy. And so there is a conflict, okay, that is developing there, an immovable object facing an irresistible force, okay? And so it's just started. It's just started. But that's very different from 1971, okay? And the other thing that's...

different from 1971, is that this apparatus of the offshore dollar system is up and running, right? You do not have to create it. It exists. It exists already. And I'm sure it's being put into force already, that you can move a lot of this stuff offshore.

Okay. And you will. It is a little peculiar that we're talking about it's a globalized financial world. The extent to which is a global world is much more true in finance than it is in trade. Mm-hmm.

Notwithstanding global supply chains and everything like that. But, you know, it takes a long time to get a car from China to New York, you know, through the Panama Canal or whatever. It doesn't take any time for money to flow this way and that way. So and they're not putting any tariffs on capital flows.

They're not putting it. So the financial system is not being threatened. This financial system that grew up over this period, maybe I shouldn't give them any ideas. Well, I mean, there is some discussion. Is there? Of the possibility. Yeah. What sort of thing? Well, for instance, maybe...

I mean, they've done some stuff around Chinese companies listing in the U.S. And there's talk about maybe you stop U.S. investors from investing in China or something like that. So that's the same thing as the Nixon playbook. That's in the 60s. You're trying to push that offshore somewhere. And so there will develop other financial centers. And that will take a while. It takes a while to develop. But there are a number of competing financial centers. You know, London was happy to take the euro dollar business.

They were like champing in the bid. We know how to do this. We did this for Sterling. We just need to change the little symbol in front and we can go. It took a while to make it all go. It was the old guys who remembered and they had to teach the young things, but the structure was there and so it could happen again. But I'm just saying it's there now. You don't need to build it. You don't need to build it. So I think that the chance that it's going to all fall apart, it's much bigger now, so that makes it harder to manage.

But it also means that it's evolved through crisis before from, you know, every time it's counted out, it's come back stronger and not just stronger, but expanding over the face of the globe. That there are these phases, you know, in 1971, it was the U.S. versus Europe. OK, then there's the Asian financial crisis, which which I understand as.

the way we were integrating Europe into the global dollar system, that it expanded and then you had to consolidate. Now it's gone to the global south, we expanded, and now we're in consolidation phase. So I think we could come out of this with a more robust system that's actually energetic and has growth. But...

Politics are the problem. Are the Americans going to be okay with this? Are the American political forces going to be okay with this? Can a new political agreement between countries be made about this? And so that's where I'm out of my depth. I don't really know. I don't really know. What I have observed in life is that the financial system sort of grows, grows, grows, grows, and then the political system decides, should we bless this or should we kill it?

you know, so there's a political settlement, okay, and then you grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, and then it happens again, you know, so that's how I see what's happening now. For me, as a library rat, as I am, you know, there's just too much noise. I don't know what's noise and what signal at the moment, so, and I do think that this, you know, attempt to play games with market valuations by announcing tariffs and then taking them off but telling your friends beforehand, you know,

is very bad for market liquidity. Why would you be a dealer to take the other side of these trades if they're just going to take this money away from you? So I think that's another place where there's stress in the system and pushback. You noticed in the last week the lack of liquidity in treasuries and things like that. I think that's a lot of what that's about. It's that the system seems to be rigged.

Let's just talk about the events since April 2nd for a second, because they're really and you alluded to it already, but there's at least two dimensions. One is the sort of pure economics of tariffs.

It's a tax hike. One useful way to think about tariffs, efforts to reshore manufacturing, perhaps efforts to kneecap China specifically. And we don't know where the tariffs are going to settle in terms of the final relationship as the time we're recording this. And we may never really know for the next four years. It seems plausible. And then there's the politics, which you mentioned, which is here you have a president who made a trade agreement with Mexico and Canada. And suddenly it's like maybe he doesn't like it anymore.

or he's willing to declare an emergency to change the trading relationship with the rest of the world. What's happening? And when I say what's happening, I mean, it's when this all gets announced. To your mind, what are the first order effects of this sort of flurry of we're changing the rules right now?

Well, I think the first order effects will be surprising. OK, I doubt that there's going to be much change in net trade flows. That may be surprising to you. OK, but what there's going to be is a change in gross trade flows. Right. This is a tax on trade is essentially what it is. OK, so that there will be less exports and less imports.

The net is the difference between those. So the net could stay the same, even as both exports and imports fall. And that will be increasing inefficiency in global, you know, division of labor. So we're moving in the direction of autarky. I don't think we're going to get there completely because there's a, I mean, it's more possible for the United States because it's a very big country. You know, there's almost everything we need, we have. It's cheaper from other places, you know, but almost everything we need, we have. It would take a while to build up the

capacity and so forth, but it's a very big country. But I think that this is in fact killing global trade and that is very bad. That's very bad for growth. That's very bad for people. Okay. So I don't know what's going to happen to global capital flows.

Because, as I say, Kindleberger in the 70s was surprised that capital flows actually continued, even though you were on a flexible exchange rate, because businesses were looking through and saying, you know, this is a long-term investment. Exchange rates are moving this way, that way. I'm not thinking about that.

OK. And there was some backstop for short term balance of payments, deficits and so forth behind the scenes. So they sort of kept the wheels from falling completely off the wagon in the 70s. And as I say, I think there's even more capacity to do that now. So I think the bottom line, the most likely thing that's going to happen is that just trade stops. I mean, I think people say I just listen to the news like you do, that essentially there's a trade embargo on China right now, like there's nothing is happening at all.

And that's a pretty big trading partner. So, I mean, I don't know that that will be the end result of this, you know, but that's the immediate shock result of this. And I think that if these tariffs were to persist, there would be much, much less trade in the world economy. And that's not good for ordinary people. Perry Merling, thank you so much for coming back on again. That was great. It's good to see you. Thank you.

Joe, it was great to catch up with Perry. Truly the perfect guest. I love, I do love catching up with Perry. Yeah. And I mean, the analogy to the Nixon shock seems to be one that people are reaching for over and over again. And I guess I can see Perry's point that there have been multiple instances where the dollar system has been tested. Yeah. And it's sort of like, I don't know, a rubber ball that you like stretch and you test it and then it just like snaps back to where it was or it gets even bigger. Right. The dollar system. And I

I guess the obvious question is, is it different this time? Right. I mean, to me, like, you know, there's a few different ideas here. So one is, you know, I think it is useful to conceptualize the quote dollar system, unquote, as this thing that exists independently of the United States government, obviously through banks wanting to have, you know, one medium of exchange, more or less, and global financial flows that are everywhere.

Then there is also this element and this idea that, you know, you can like tax trade and you can have a shrinkage of trade, but that's not necessarily going to make it so that there's a different calculation about the global currency to use, etc. And there's no obvious replacement just yet. All that being said, like.

Part of the reason this moment and honestly, before April 2nd, part of the reason this moment seems so fraught, perhaps to people is precisely because of the politics specifically. Exactly. Which is Paris that you couldn't really talk to. But if there's going to be some sort of real disruption, I suspect it would come from

a political change rather than just a change in fiscal policy. Right. And this is sort of the policy point. This is exactly it. Whereas before, I think everyone had like a relatively decent or reasonable grasp of what policymakers were trying to do. Yeah, that's right. That seems very unclear. And we've written about this in the newsletter. But if you think about the dollar and dollar based assets as a sort of symbol or, you

token of America's like rule of law and institutional strength, then it does seem different this time. Yeah, kind of does. Okay. So shall we leave it on that happy note? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Traci Allaway. You can follow me at Traci Allaway.

And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Check out our guest Perry Merriling. He's at P. Merriling. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Arman, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, and Cale Brooks at Cale Brooks. For more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash Odd Lots, where we have all of our episodes in the daily newsletter. And you can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our Discord community.

discord.gg slash oddlots. And if you enjoy OddLots, if you like it when we talk to Perry Merling about Trump's playbook and the Nixon shock, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening. ♪

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