Le reste du monde contre QE2

Le reste du monde contre QE2

Depuis que la Federal Reserve a pris, le 3 novembre, sa décision dite QE2 (Quantitative Easing 2, terme technique rassurant pour désigner la planche à billets), portant sur près de $1.000 milliards, les réactions ne cessent pas et rassemblent littéralement “the Rest Of the World” (ROW) contre les USA. Cette décision reflète à la fois la position arbitraire, irresponsable et insupportable du dollar dans le système mondial, et la politique générale la plus unilatéraliste et la plus irresponsable pour les relations internationales qu’aient développé les USA dans une telle période de tension, où ils prétendent justement conduire le processus général de lutte contre la crise. La décision, dans le cadre de cette politique, reflète également le désordre intérieur de Washington, l’absence de stratégie à long terme au profit du court terme le plus irresponsable, et, d’une façon générale, le sentiment d’impuissance des autorités US devant leur incapacité à juguler leur propre crise économique.

Deux commentaires de cette décision et des divers événements qui se sont enchaînés depuis.

• Dans le Daily Telegraph du 6 novembre 2010, Liam Halligan observe que la décision de la Federal Reserve contribue décisivement à isoler les USA du reste du monde et à mettre en place les conditions d’une crise majeure à différents niveaux, risquant de déclencher différents processus d’inflation et indirectement de situations de famine. Halligan estime qu’il s’agit d’un “Suez économique” (allusion à la crise de Suez de 1956) pour les USA.

«Last Wednesday was a hinge point in history. The United States decided to drop all pretence of being interested in leading – or even being part of – a coordinated global policy response to the most serious economic crisis in more than 70 years. […] America is now isolated and the rest of the world is furious. The widespread use of capital controls and even a lurch into 1930s-style protectionism are both far more likely than just a few days ago.

»In the aftermath of the Fed's QE2 announcement, rather than agreeing to measures that would ease pressure on the US economy, China gave the States a public tongue-lashing. Measures to cap trade surpluses would "hark back to the days of planned economies", said Cui Tiankai, who will be one of China's lead negotiators in Seoul. […]

»Up until now, the rest of the world has been willing to tolerate unprecedented money-printing by the US – and the UK for that matter. QE has been used to help various financial institutions avoid facing up to their losses, while covertly recapitalising Western banks that are, to all intents and purposes, insolvent. Money-printing has also pumped up equity prices. After the latest Fed-induced “sugar rush”, the FTSE global all-share index hit a two-year high. […]

»But, in recent weeks, something has changed. Big players such as China, Brazil – and Germany too – think the US has gone far too far and are now saying so. Their patience has snapped, given the far-reaching negative impact of QE beyond America's shores. “While everybody wants the US economy to recover,” said Guido Mantega, Brazil's highly-respected finance minister, “it does no good at all to just throw dollars from a helicopter.”

»In a newspaper article, Xia Bin, a long-standing adviser to China's Central Bank, last week referred to the unbridled printing of dollars as “the biggest risk” to the global economy. “As long as the world exercises no restraint in issuing dollars then the occurrence of another crisis is inevitable, as some wise Westerners have lamented,” he wrote.

»Along with fears that the Fed is blowing yet another asset-price bubble, that will lead to a damaging collapse, America stands accused (rightly) of using QE to artificially depress the dollar, so unfairly boosting US exports at the expense of those from elsewhere, including the eurozone. At the same time, a lower US currency also reduces the real value of the huge debts that America owes the rest of the world – not least the Chinese. [ …]

»Aside from precious metals, the nightmare scenario is that QE causes a surge in the price of commodities and other inputs needed to keep the Western world running – as investors use such assets as an “anti-debasement hedge”.

»There are signs this is starting to happen, beyond the crude markets. Since August, when the prospect of more Fed QE became real, cotton prices are up 68pc, sugar prices have risen 66pc and rice is up by a third.

»That's why QE will be blamed for so much more than “unfair” currency devaluations and for imposing a “soft default” on America's creditors. This crazy money-printing is going to be seen as the primary cause of Western inflation, food riots and a commodity price spike.

»This policy, in my view, is nothing less than America's “economic Suez”.

• Ce 9 novembre 2010, WSWS.org s’attache à l’article (dans le Financial Times) de Robert Zoellick, président de la Banque Mondiale, qui propose d’envisager un nouveau rôle de référence internationale pour l’or. Cette proposition se place directement dans la logique de la décision QE2 de la Federal Reserve, et comme une contestation majeure de cette décision. WSWS.org, qui a déjà consacré un article à QE2 (le 5 novembre 2010), revient sur le sujet en insistant à nouveau sur les dangers d'affrontements que la décision implique.

«In the run-up to the G20 summit of leading economies, to be held Thursday and Friday in Seoul, the president of the World Bank has published a column in the Financial Times calling for a fundamental revamping of the global currency system involving a lesser role for the US dollar and a modified gold standard… […]

»Here Zoellick is referring to the announcement by the US Federal Reserve last week of a second round of “quantitative easing”—the printing of hundreds of billions of dollars to buy US Treasury securities—and the sharp criticisms of this move by major US trade competitors including China, Germany, South Africa and Brazil. The US move is seen correctly as an intensification of a deliberate policy to cheapen the dollar in order to make exports less expensive and foreign imports more expensive.

»The Obama administration is focusing its economic attack on China. It wants to line up Europe, Japan, India and other Asian countries at the G20 summit behind its demand that China allow its currency to appreciate more rapidly.

»However, its cheap dollar policy is roiling relations with other export-oriented, surplus nations, most notably Germany. In unusually bellicose language, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble denounced the US in an interview this week with Spiegel magazine. Saying the American “growth model” is in “deep crisis,” he added, “The United States lived on borrowed money for too long, inflating its financial sector and neglecting its small and mid-sized industrial companies.”

»He went on to declare: “The Fed’s decisions bring more uncertainty to the global economy… It’s inconsistent for the Americans to accuse the Chinese of manipulating exchange rates and then to artificially depress the dollar exchange rate by printing money.”

»The US—the world’s biggest debtor nation—is exploiting the privileged position of the dollar as the primary world reserve and trading currency to drive up the exchange rates of its rivals, in essence a trade war measure. It is unleashing a flood of speculative capital into so-called emerging economies in Asia, Latin America and Africa, pushing their currencies even higher and creating the danger of speculative bubbles and inflation.

This aggressive and unilateralist policy on the part of the United States is exacerbating global tensions and destabilizing the world monetary and financial system. It is heightening the likelihood of a breakdown of international relations and the outbreak of the type of uncontrolled currency and trade warfare that characterized the Great Depression and led ultimately to World War II.»

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