Dollar reigns supreme in developing world, but not for long

Developing nations over-leverage their economies to external foreign debt, most often the US dollar, due to an optimistic perception of global monetary stability and low, long-term interest rates. With dollar interest rates near zero for the past eight years, dollar indebtedness has soared in many developing countries and the piper will soon call.
Many developing countries confront too many protectionist regulations and export fixated mindsets that prevent not only foreign investment formation but also preclude the development of real endogenous growth initiatives, including entrepreneurial innovation and domestic small business growth.
Hot money inflows with a low interest-rate dollar since 2007 and the global debt crisis have allowed developing nations to avoid undertaking economic reforms to structural and systemic problems. These structural issues encompass: too many people working for government in redundant jobs, a plethora of inefficient state-owned companies, backward-looking education policies and layers of stifling regulations on small businesses at all levels.
Countries are undertaking many desperate headline-grabbing measures to avoid restructuring their current systems, lest political support be lost. Consider a few fiscal gimmicks: quantitative easing (printing more money), as tried by most developing countries, including Turkey and Vietnam, to cheapen labour and exports; tax amnesties, as recently in Indonesia and Argentina to bring back money held abroad; issuances of dollar bonds, as in Zimbabwe, to shore up deficient foreign exchange holdings.
Such mechanisms, intended to restore money in legitimate economic systems, are not a panacea in lieu of much needed structural reforms. Put simply, a currency devaluation or any of its proxies are a method for balancing budgetary deficits due to a nation’s failure to enact deep structural reforms and expect sacrifices of citizens. All currency devaluations underway today are against the dollar only.
If any devaluation is ultimately recompensed against a baseline dollar value, then a zero sum game ensues in an atomised world of unfettered communication with instant market adjustments. In other words, devaluations are quickly observed by all, not just bankers and businessmen, as in the pre-Internet era.
Simply, few in the developing world trust their own currencies. The wealthy want dollars and these nations have created de facto dollarised economies.
The Chinese currency is pegged to the dollar, but on a sliding scale that has recently trended downward with what bankers have called “stealth devaluation”. Nonetheless the Chinese are not fooled and are so desperate to get their money out of China that property bubbles have emerged in cities like Vancouver or London, where prices have increased by almost 50 percent since 2011. Another tactic is “smurfing”, or using another person’s bank account to evade government limits on transfers.
The communist response has been to clamp down harder on capital outflows while talking about eventually revamping the export economy in general terms, floating more government loans to non-performing state-owned enterprises. China’s priority is political stability at all costs, not the currency!
Effectively, a gigantic confidence game is forming, and the 2016 International Monetary Fund Special Drawing Rights re-weighting only reaffirmed this trend with dollar pre-eminence barely changed at a plurality of 42 per cent while the euro took the brunt of re-weighting to make room for the Chinese renminbi as a new reserve currency. The move was political on the part of the IMF, deigned to fete Chinese nationalism, as the renminbi does not meet all conditions of a “reserve currency”.
Nonetheless, most nations are now levered to the dollar, a currency with significant flaws in its own underpinnings, namely a $20 trillion national debt, expected to grow further under the Trump presidency and his infrastructure spending plans, not to mention a US Federal Reserve that seeks to raise interest rates beset by a world of zero or negative rates. No other nation could survive economically with such compromised policies. No one knows exactly how a dollarised world against a low-interest rate environment will eventually play out. Additionally, there are only so many physical dollars in circulation. A run on the world’s dollar supply by all countries in tandem could see a sudden unwelcome surge in the currency’s value, ruining many private and government investors who originally issued dollar debts but receive payments in local currency, ergo the concept of “original sin”.
Currency gurus of Eichengreen, Rogoff and Hanke each have their macroeconomic theories of what might happen. In truth, surprising consequences could be in store in 2017.
Dollar hegemony is here to stay, a form of neo-colonialism, tethering the developing world, and increasingly the middle-income world, to US economic policy. Economies like those of Venezuela, Iran, Nigeria, Turkey and Indonesia are based on dollars for energy, infrastructure, trade and finance. The countries have little choice but to continue using a “too big to fail” foreign currency.
 
Will Hickey is author of “Energy and Human Resource Development in Developing Countries: Towards Effective Localisation”.