Easy to fix speculators, harder to fix problems

Looking at the turbulence in the Yuan HIBOR market, I was reminded of Thailand in 1997-98. I remember writing about the Thai episode at that time:

To speculate against the baht, a hedge fund has to sell baht, and to do so, it must directly or indirectly borrow baht. If the attack succeeds, the hedge fund would be able to buy back the baht at lower prices and repay the borrowing. The Bank of Thailand attempted to make this difficult by preventing residents from lending baht to non residents in any form including direct loans, overdrafts, currency swaps, interest rate swaps, forward rate agreements, currency options, interest rate options, outright forward transactions. It also preventing residents from selling baht to non residents against payment in foreign currencies. Simultaneously, the Bank of Thailand intervened heavily in the offshore market especially in the forward market. All this created an acute shortage of baht in the offshore market and drove up interest rates in that market to several hundred percent. In the process, several hedge funds reportedly made losses as they scrambled to buy or borrow baht to meet their obligations. When they tried to obtain baht by selling Thai stocks, the Bank of Thailand responded with a rule that the proceeds of all stock sales must be remitted in foreign currency and not in baht.

This policy was hugely successful in its immediate objective of punishing the hedge funds who had the temerity to short the Thai baht. Both the technocrats who engineered this and their political masters were immensely pleased with this result, and boasted about their success. But, all this did nothing to save the baht or fix Thailand’s economic problems back then. Unfortunately, neither the technocrats nor the politicians ever seem to learn the critical lesson that it is easy for a sovereign to fix the speculators, it is much harder to fix the underlying problems that cause the speculation in the first place.

Posted at 4:20 pm IST on Wed, 13 Jan 2016         permanent link

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