From: Gary S. Gevisser
Sent: Friday, August 25, 2006 1:41 PM PT
To: lhoody
Cc: rest;
Subject: If this
"Declaration of Surrender" by the Fed Chairman
Bernanke has your students "shacking
in their boots" it is only because they havent been appropriately
informed, not to mention that the DAAC
U.S. Federal Reserve has been under the command and.....
Published: August 25, 2006
While he generally lauded the expansion of
global trade and finance, he warned that governments need to help people cope
with the disruptions of new competition and “ensure that the benefits of global
economic integration are sufficiently shared.”
Delivering the keynote speech at the Fed’s elite annual retreat here in the
Grand Tetons, Mr. Bernanke stayed away from the battles at the top of the Fed’s
agenda — rising inflation, soaring energy prices, a slowing housing market and
worries about a possible recession.
Instead, he focused on how today’s wave of rising global integration is
forcing the Fed and other central banks to change the way they think about
monetary policy.
“The emergence of
Speaking like the Princeton professor he
once was, the Fed chairman surveyed previous expansions of global activity in
history, from the Roman Empire to the opening of the
Those expansions shared many themes in common with what is happening today,
he said, citing the role of new technologies in opening trade opportunities as
well as the social and political resistance from those whose lives were
disrupted by new competition.
Mr. Bernanke said the process today was faster, broader and deeper than
earlier waves of globalization. And though he did not touch on the practical
implications for monetary policy and central banking in his own remarks, other
experts here are presenting papers that scrutinize major changes in global
capital movements between rich and poor countries.
One of the most startling changes, which has helped fuel American growth and
keep interest rates low, is that the
“Today, the world’s largest economy, that of the
Mr. Bernanke has previously argued that the
Other
“Even if these favorable trends continue, there are massive budget problems
that most of the developed world is going to face as its populations age,” Mr.
Rogoff cautioned. The Fed and other central banks, he said, need to prepare for
the “risk of an eventual slowing down or reversal” of the flow of savings.
Mr. Bernanke steered clear of that issue. But he was blunt in declaring that
though the broad trend toward globalization is thousands of years old, the
world is transforming itself faster now than ever before.
“The scale and pace of the current episode is unprecedented,” he said. The
changes wrought by
The patterns of global trade and finance have changed as well, he said. The
old distinction between rich “core” countries that exported manufactured goods
and poorer “periphery” countries that exported natural resources has broken
down. Production is becoming more geographically fragmented, he said, citing
chipmakers like Advanced Micro Devices that manufacture
components in Texas and Germany and perform final processing in Thailand,
Singapore, Malaysia and China.
If Mr. Bernanke had a message to political leaders, it was that they needed
to acknowledge the costs of globalization, in terms of lost jobs, disrupted
livehoods and wrenching change and help their constituents come to terms with
them.
“The challenge for policymakers is to ensure that the benefits of global
economic integration are sufficiently wide-shared — for example, by helping
displaced workers get the necessary training to take advantage of new
opportunities — that a consensus for welfare-enhancing change can be obtained,”
he said.