He's Back: The Jim Baker Factor
December 14, 2000
By, Barclay T. Leib
Well Bush is in, and Gore contrite and now gone. And with Bush, it appears we may get a renewed taste of Jim Baker. Anyone who knows financial history
at all will remember that it was Baker who truly set off a series of destabilizing global economic moves that essentially begot our current U.S. economic
bubble and Japan's unending economic miasma.
"If the U.S. trade deficit is too large with Japan, well, let's just drive the dollar lower," was Baker's 1985 Plaza Accord tone. But as the dollar went lower, the
trade deficit did not improve, so he asked on a secondary basis that the Japanese ease their interest rates. They grudgingly did so, which in turn created a
huge round of domestic speculation in Japanese equities and real estate. When Finance Minister Miyazowa finally popped that bubble by snugging rates in
early 1990, much Japanese money started to flow out of Japan into U.S. real estate, fixed income, and equity markets. There it made the U.S. trade deficit
worse yet again, hurt the Japanese even further as the U.S. currency was continually debased, but left Americans with a glowing sense of success and
hubris. Meanwhile rates in Japan were dropped so low in an attempt to re-stimulate their domestic economy (again, much at the behest of U.S. politicians)
that many pension funds and insurance companies in Japan are now largely insolvent. Then, as a crowning blow, dollar-yen went down 30% in three days
in 1998, leaving Japanese investors stuck with U.S assets even further under water in yen terms.
Baker wasn't responsible for it all of course, but his Woodrow Wilson School arrogance that he could micro-manage the global economy to the benefit of the
U.S. economy clearly set off this daisy-chain of unintended consequences. Now he's back with George W. and it will be interesting to see what roll he plays
in the new administration. Certainly many old-timers will remember his willingness to talk the dollar lower at all costs for a very long time.
So it is we turn to the current chart of the March euro fx futures. Is that a reverse head and shoulders bottom we spy? Usually early to call a bottom, we
warned of an important euro low back in mid-September. Prices have been grinding around in a sculpted bottom ever since. Now Jim Baker's potentially
back. With cars not selling very well out of Detroit, we wonder what Baker's first inclination about that would be? |
