标题：Managed Floats to Damp World-Wide Exchange Rate Liquidity
Shocks Like 1982-5, 2006-9: Field and Laboratory Evidence for the
Benefits of a Single World Currency
摘要：
This paper's field evidence is: (1) in reality a major exchange
rate change devastates an economy, i.e. the widespread academic
faith that exchange rate changes are either beneficial or harmless
is a false faith that contributes to needless world-wide economic
havoc; (2) the 1982-85 exchange rate liquidity crisis sent much
of the third world into unmanageable debt levels and was so devastating
for the first world that in 1985 the G5 instituted managed cooperating
floats; (3) nearly all economists in the official sector and in
academe rapidly forgot the devastation and reverted to advocating
what caused that devastation, namely a closed economy clean floats
exchange rate perspective; and (4) the 2006-2008/9 exchange rate
liquidity shock would have been far more drastic but for central
bank currency swaps yet the role of these swaps in averting unmanageable
exchange rate mayhem that would have precluded the September 2008
rescue of the world financial system, has been ignored. The field
evidence thus decisively favours stabilizing managed floats, or
better a single world currency, and a means of preventing economists
in official sectors and in academe forgetting the devastation and
dangers of multiple currencies.
This field evidence is bolstered by a laboratory experiment. The
experiment incorporates more aspects of real world complexity and
more different sorts of official and private sector agents than
other investigations and employs a new central bank cooperation-conflict
model of exchange rate determination. The experiment allows an interpretation
within an umbrella theory of Pope, namely SKAT, the Stages of Knowledge
Ahead Theory.
Our joint field plus laboratory evidence indicates that official sectors should maintain an international exchange rate oriented
perspective as advocated in Davidson 2009 and in the September 2010 Report by UNCTAD, the UN Conference on Trade and
Development. But our field evidence details needless fragility in cooperatively managed exchange rate systems. Our joint field
plus laboratory evidence thus favours a single world currency, a possibility put on the agenda in March 2009 by Zhou
Xiaochuan, head of the People's Bank of China, recommended in July 2009 by the Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, and
forwarded as an option in the April 2010 International Monetary Fund Report on Reserve Accumulation and International
Monetary Stability.
To avoid rapid forgetting of havoc from isolationist clean floats and the value of stable exchange rates, indeed better yet a single
world currency, a new syllabus, as under the SKAT umbrella, is fundamental. SKAT allows for risk effects including those from
(a) difficulties of agents in evaluating alternatives in a complex environment in which the assumed maximization of expected
utility is impossible; (b) planning difficulties under uncertainty; and c) the preference for safety and reliability is not trivialized.
SKAT contrasts with the current economists' paradigm of expected utility and game theory that lacks a), b) and c) and hence
lacks a means for economists to understand that exchange rate uncertainty matters. SKAT is fundamental for the education of
official sector members in order to furnish them with a coherent alternative intellectual framework to current university education
that excludes liquidity crises and debt costs due to unpredicted exchange rate changes.
