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 In private and in public at last week's global central banking
conference in Jackson Hole, the message from visiting policymakers
was that the Fed has telegraphed an initial monetary tightening and,
following a year-long rise in the dollar, financial markets globally
are as ready as they can be.
The powerful group gathered at the end of a roller-coaster week in
markets in which the Dow tanked by 1,000 points on Monday on
concerns of a slowdown in China but recovered to trade higher by the
end of the week. Remarks by Fed officials that liftoff could come in
September were blamed by some for that volatility.
But for Agustin Carstens, the top central banker in Mexico, a rate
hike by his neighbor sends an encouraging sign of economic health,
even if it does force growth-challenged Mexico to also raise rates
within days.
"If the Fed tightens, it will be due to the fact that they have a
perception that inflation is drifting up, but more important that
unemployment is falling and the economy is recovering," Carstens
told Reuters in an interview.
"For us, that is very good news," he added.
While Yao Yudong, head of the People's Bank of China Research
Institute of Finance and Banking, last week blamed the Fed for the
market turmoil and said a U.S. hike should be delayed, most central
bankers from emerging markets contacted by Reuters at Jackson Hole
and over the past month shared Carstens' view.
An end to more than six years of rock bottom U.S. rates will touch
off a wave of potentially painful adjustments as countries deal with
the likelihood of an even stronger dollar as well as capital
outflows from some emerging markets and changes in the relative
prices of traded goods. An end to uncertainty for policymakers,
however, could outweigh those difficulties.
Effects of the Fed's easy money have been felt in countries as
diverse as Chile and Switzerland. Annual inflation in Chile has
consistently come in above the bank's target range of 2 percent to 4
percent.
In Switzerland, the central bank has been forced to keep rates
negative since it removed its cap on the franc at 1.20 to the euro,
sending the currency soaring and putting a major strain on the
export-dependent Swiss economy.
"Latin America has seen a surge of inflation" as countries
"internalize" the evolution of Fed policy, Central Bank of Chile
Governor Rodrigo Vergara told the conference.
TWO YEARS OF PREPARATION
Those sorts of trends have been under way for some two years, when
then Fed chairman Ben Bernanke set off a global "taper tantrum" when
he suggested the central bank was preparing to scale back its
bond-buying program.
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Two years after the taper tantrum, Fed officials say some volatility
is unavoidable when the shift in policy occurs.
"For emerging markets, the smaller economies, they're often looking
for a weaker currency. So from their perspective a tightening move
by the Fed might be helpful to weaken their currency and help them
do what they want to do," St. Louis Fed President James Bullard said
in an interview.
There are opponents to a hike - most notably the People's Bank of
China and the International Monetary Fund, which has urged the Fed
to delay until the world economy is on a stronger footing.
But even frequent Fed critics said at Jackson Hole that the time was
coming to hike.
"It's a long anticipated event," Reserve Bank of India Governor
Raghuram Rajan said on a conference panel, sitting alongside Fed
Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer. "It has to happen some time -
everybody knows it has to happen - but pick your time."
Those comments were supported by central bankers from Japan, South
Korea and Indonesia. When asked earlier this month whether he
thought the Fed should hike in September, Bank Indonesia Senior
Deputy Governor Mirza Adityaswara told Reuters in Jakarta: "The more
certainty there is, the better."
A senior South Korean policymaker echoed that sentiment.
"A lift at an already expected timing would be better in a sense
that it clears up one of the big uncertainties over the issue and it
would mean the U.S. economic recovery is deemed sustainable," he
said, speaking on condition of anonymity
as he was not authorized to comment publicly by the Bank of Korea.
(Additional reporting by Reuters bureaux in Seoul, Jakarta and
Bangkok; Editing by David Chance and Mary Milliken)
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