by John B. Taylor via Cato Institute
It is a pleasure to be on this panel on moving toward a more rules-based international monetary system. Over the past few years I have been making the case for such a system. In fact I made the case over 30 years ago in Taylor (1985), and the ideas go back over 30 years before that to Milton Friedman (1953). However, the case for such a system is now much stronger because the monetary system drifted away from a rules-based approach in the past dozen years and, as Paul Volcker (2014) reminds us, the absence of a rules-based monetary system “has not been a great success.”
Carmen Reinhart of Harvard University, describing a study she co-authored in February, reported that the US dollar has retained its dominant position as the global reserve currency despite America's declining share of global output over the past few decades. But she wondered how much longer that would last.