Barry Eichengreen: Like the 1930s, in Reverse
Barry Eichengreen, in the hall outside my office, says:
There are now fifty countries in the world with inflation rates over 10%. It's like the early 1930s, but just reverse the sign: back then everybody with their currency linked to the dollar imported deflation; now everybody is importing inflation.
The solution then as now is the same: delink your currency from the dollar.
This is the first major test of inflation-targeting in emerging markets. I wrote up a little something on this this morning, but I have been unable to submit it anyplace because for some reason my email is down...