The Brexit depreciation and exports

I’ve read a number of people say, observing the lack of growth of UK exports, that this illustrates how depreciations have little impact on trade flows these days. This is a classic case of reasoning from a price change. I think the phrase ‘never reason from a price change’ was popularised by Scott Sumner, although I got it from Nick Rowe.

The depreciation of sterling happened because of Brexit. Some of the depreciation might have been a result of the expected cut in UK interest rates, which means it should be temporary. The rest was to compensate for the impact of Brexit on UK trade. In both cases, therefore, exporting firms in aggregate get a temporary boost to their competitiveness (or profitability of trading), which will come to an end when interest rates rise again or Brexit actually happens, perhaps imposing tariffs or other costs that reduce competitiveness.

The temporary boost to competitiveness/profitability will be good for firms that already compete in overseas markets. But I learnt many years ago when I estimated aggregate trade equations that a lot of the effect from a depreciation comes from firms trading in new markets that they had previously considered unprofitable. To do that requires some investment: in distribution and marketing, for example. A firm is unlikely to make that investment if the gain in competitiveness is temporary.

This helps explain an otherwise puzzling feature of aggregate trade following a depreciation that - unlike Brexit - leads to a permanent improvement in competitiveness. It takes many months before the full improvement in trade volumes comes through. If it was just a matter of goods getting cheaper and people buying more of them you would expect a fairly instantaneous impact, but if firms are having to invest to expand markets, the full impact will take longer to come through. [1]

In the case of Brexit the gain to competitiveness is temporary. It is a mistake to start with the depreciation, and then be disappointed by the lack of any reaction. Once you ask why there has been a depreciation, it becomes clearer why any gain to exports is likely to be modest. [2]

[1] As tariff changes are perhaps likely to be more permanent than exchange rate changes, this may also help explain the puzzle discussed here.

[2] This argument apart, one other thing you quickly learn if you monitor aggregate trade is how erratic it is. We will not know for sure what the impact of the Brexit depreciation has been until well after Brexit itself.  

The big story behind Port Talbot

In today’s print edition of the New Statesman I have a brief review of Yanis Varoufakis’s new book. (The review also looks at Piketty’s newly published collection and translation of newspaper articles. I’ll talk more about each when the review appears online, but for now you can read a similar (in parts) double review by Paul Mason.) The organising macroeconomic theme in his book is the need to find systems capable of successfully dealing with current account surpluses. In my review I say I’m not sure whether this framework is really capable of holding up everything that the author wants it to support, but there is no doubt of the importance of the issue. For example, it seems to me this is the framework, albeit at a more industry specific level, with which to see the current crisis over the threatened closure of the UK’s steel plant at Port Talbot.

The surplus in question here is the surplus Chinese capacity to produce steel. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Telegraph, who has a similar perspective, reports an OECD estimate that China's excess capacity is over twice the size of total European Steel production. Because China is able to subsidise production in various ways, this means this steel can beat UK production on price. The US department of commerce is reported as thinking that the subsidy on some types of steel justifies a tariff of 236%!

If this is correct, then this story is not about neoliberalism or the free market, but a story of a rigged market. To put it another way, it is a market where one set of producers have the ability to eliminate their competitors by flooding the market at a loss because they have the ‘deep pockets’ of a state behind them.

The EU have been trying to raise tariffs against Chinese steel producers for three years, but have been blocked by a coalition of countries led by the UK. The UK Business minister Sajid Javid has been quite explicit about this: he prefers cheap steel because it helps other parts of UK industry. It may also have something to do with wanting to curry favour with China because of other matters (which was the point of John McDonnell’s Little Red Book stunt, if only he hadn’t started reading from it!). This is not Javid upholding the principles of a free market, but instead allowing a large state to rig a market. The irony in this case is that the state in question is not the one he works for. 

Postscript (11/4/16) For more detail, see this from Ben Chu