Globalization makes national currencies obsolete
Benn Steil, Special to the Financial Post
Published: Thursday, November 08, 2007
Virtually every major argument recently levelled against globalization has been levelled against markets generally (and, in turn, debunked) for hundreds of years. But the argument against capital flows in a world with 150 fluctuating national fiat monies is fundamentally different. It is highly compelling — so much so that even globalization’s staunchest supporters treat capital flows as an exception, a matter to be intellectually quarantined until effective crisis inoculations can be developed. But the notion that capital flows are inherently destabilizing is logically and historically false. The lessons of gold-based globalization in the 19th century simply must be relearned. Just as the prodigious daily capital flows between New York and California, two of the world’s 12 largest economies, are so uneventful that no one even notices them, capital flows between countries sharing a single currency, such as the dollar or the euro, attract not the slightest attention from even the most passionate anti-globalization activists.
The world can do better. Since economic development outside the process of globalization is no longer possible, countries should abandon monetary nationalism. Governments should replace national currencies with the dollar or the euro or, in the case of Asia, collaborate to produce a new multinational currency over a comparably large and economically diversified area.
November 18th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
[...] | Treasury’s Plan Would Give Fed Wide New Power | Consider a continental currency: Jarislowsky | Globalization makes national currencies obsolete | Vicente Fox Admits Plan For Single NAFTA Currency | The Illustrated Road to Serfdom | Fraser [...]
December 6th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
[...] | Treasury’s Plan Would Give Fed Wide New Power | Consider a continental currency: Jarislowsky | Globalization makes national currencies obsolete | Vicente Fox Admits Plan For Single NAFTA Currency | Fraser Institute: The Case for the [...]
January 30th, 2009 at 4:12 am
[...] | Treasury’s Plan Would Give Fed Wide New Power | Consider a continental currency: Jarislowsky | Globalization makes national currencies obsolete | Vicente Fox Admits Plan For Single NAFTA Currency | Fraser Institute: The Case for the [...]
January 30th, 2009 at 7:32 pm
[...] | Treasury’s Plan Would Give Fed Wide New Power | Consider a continental currency: Jarislowsky | Globalization makes national currencies obsolete | Vicente Fox Admits Plan For Single NAFTA Currency | Fraser Institute: The Case for the [...]
March 21st, 2009 at 5:48 am
[...] | Treasury’s Plan Would Give Fed Wide New Power | Consider a continental currency: Jarislowsky | Globalization makes national currencies obsolete | Vicente Fox Admits Plan For Single NAFTA Currency | Fraser Institute: The Case for the [...]
April 23rd, 2009 at 3:51 pm
[...] | Treasury’s Plan Would Give Fed Wide New Power | Consider a continental currency: Jarislowsky | Globalization makes national currencies obsolete | Vicente Fox Admits Plan For Single NAFTA Currency | Fraser Institute: The Case for the [...]
October 17th, 2009 at 5:50 am
[...] [...]
March 29th, 2010 at 8:45 pm
[...] currency? | Loonie leaps, then reverses course | Consider a continental currency: Jarislowsky | Globalization makes national currencies obsolete | Vicente Fox Admits Plan For Single NAFTA Currency | Fraser Institute: The Case for the [...]