In this paper, we highlight a new channel through which dollar fluctuations can become a self-fulfilling pro-cyclical force. We call this mechanism Imperial Circle as it makes the dollar the dominant macroeconomic variable in the context of the current international monetary system. At the core of it, there is a fundamental asymmetry between the shrinking exposure of the “real” US economy to global developments versus the growing global role of the US dollar. Dollar appreciation leads to a decline in global economic activity, which in turn benefits, in relative terms, the dollar itself, reinforcing the initial appreciation and its effects.
See also Degaspari et al, (2023) who focuses on the global transmission mechanism of U.S. monetary policy shock
The recovery, combined with a high exchange rate, tends to increase imports and augments the trade deficit. Moreover, a high trade deficit combined with a high exchange rate moderates inflation.The U.S. enjoys the best of all possible worlds: strong economic growth, low inflation and a budget deficit financed with an influx of foreign goods and foreign capital. Soros (1984): I shall call this benign circle the “ Imperial Circle.”
In their analysis, they study the impact of dollar strength on the shipments of exporters that have financing needs building on the fact that dollar-denominated credit is an important share of credit-related activity according to data from SWIFT.
To capture this link they look at the ratio of world trade over GDP as a proxy of Global Value Chain activity versus the dollar index (see Bruno and Shin (2012)).
This structural factor is related to the direction of private capital flows toward the U.S. economy reflecting the massive global asset shortage that is more pronounced in Asia. The asset shortage theme is also a by-product of the policy choices from an official sector point of view. Benigno et al. (2020) note the build-up of foreign exchange reserves by emerging countries and in particular East-Asian economies. In the period starting from 1980 to 2022, the average reserves to GDP ratio for East Asian economies rose from 14 percent to 52 percent. This large scale in foreign reserve accumulation is directed mainly toward U.S. dollar assets. Indeed, as documented in Bertaut et al. (2021), dollar assets are still about 60 percent of globally disclosed official foreign reserves. The global saving glut (Bernanke 2020) is the expression of these structural forces coming from policy choices and economic factors leading to structural demand for US assets as a supporting element in determining relative dollar strength.
Note though that in this paper we abstract from the financial side dimension of the Imperial Dollar.
The cost of adjusting Home bond holdings by Foreign households, taking the following functional form: \(\phi _{H,t}^* = exp \left( -\nu _H^*\frac{B_{Ht}^*}{S_{Ft}^H P_{C,t}^* Y_t^* } \right)\), is introduced for ensuring the stationarity of the model (see, Schmitt-Grohe and Uribe (2003) for details).
Our model’s assumption on working capital loans can be micro-founded as in Akinci and Queralto (2023) proposing a full-fledged general equilibrium macroeconomic model that has a tight link between the evolution of risk premium faced by EMs and the depreciation of their exchange rates in face of unexpected U.S. monetary tightening.
When \(i=T\), \(P^i_{t}\) refers to the domestic production price of the tradable good \(P_{Ht}\) for the Home case. Similarly, \(P_{Ft}^*\) in Foreign and \(P_{Wt}^{**}\) in World tradable sector.
Appendix B contains a complete description of the closed-form equilibrium conditions of the model.
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The authors thank Ethan Nourbash and William Cross-Bermingham for excellent research assistance. Special thanks to our discussants Ryan Chahrour and Helene Rey, and participants at the IMF 23rd Jacques Polak Annual Research Conference and the CEPR symposium 2023 for very helpful suggestions. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve or the Federal Reserve System.
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Authors and Affiliations
Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York, USA
Ozge Akinci
HEC-University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
Gianluca Benigno
University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, USA
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