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Falling Dollar Not the U.S.'s Problem, Pimco's McCulley Says

Feb. 6 (Bloomberg) -- The falling dollar isn't a problem for the U.S. and shouldn't be stemmed by the Federal Reserve increasing interest rates, said Paul McCulley, who helps manage about $100 billion at Pacific Investment Management Co.

The other six members of the Group of Seven industrialized nations should fight gains in their currencies by cutting interest rates, McCulley wrote in a commentary on the Web site of the Newport Beach, California-based company. Pimco is a unit of Allianz AG and manages the world's largest bond fund.

``The dollar is America's currency, but a falling dollar is not America's problem,'' McCulley wrote. ``Instead, rising non- dollar currencies that mirror a falling dollar are a foreign growth-stunting problem, and the problem that other G-7 nations should address with reflationary monetary policies.''

Finance ministers from the G-7 nations start a two-day meeting today in Boca Raton, Florida. Members of the G-7 are the U.S., Japan, Germany, France, the U.K., Italy and Canada. The euro, which is Europe's common currency, and the Canadian dollar both rose more than 20 percent against the dollar in 2003.

The perception that the Fed may be trying to support the dollar with higher interest rates gathered steam after the central bank last week dropped the term ``considerable period'' from its statement on how long it can keep interest rates low just, McCulley said.

With the phrase, which was dropped just before the G-7 meeting, the Fed had made it certain that creating jobs and preventing deflation were its primary goals, ``and this is the way it should be,'' he said.

Past Mistakes

Fed policy makers should be wary of making the same mistakes as G-7 finance ministers at the Louvre in 1987, when they agreed to cooperate to stop the decline of the dollar through coordinated monetary policy, he said. The Louvre Accord reversed the 1985 Plaza Accord that resulted in a coordinated depreciation of the U.S. currency.

The problems started when Germany's Bundesbank broke the Louvre agreement by raising its target rate in September 1987 even though the German deutsche mark was rising. Then Treasury Secretary James Baker indicated the U.S. wouldn't defend the dollar, causing the bond market to tumble and the stock market to crash that October as investors speculated the Fed would begin ``draconian tightening'' to bolster the dollar, McCulley said.

The agreement set at the Louvre was ``a very dangerous precedent,'' he said. ``That episode created the impression that America would repeatedly tighten monetary policy, if the dollar were to weaken -- to wit, that the Fed had made a pact with the devil at the Louvre.''

Greenspan, Dollar

Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan has indicated he isn't concerned about the falling dollar. Last month he said the currency's depreciation hadn't yet resulted in faster inflation and that the U.S. is able to fund its near-record current account deficit, which includes trade in goods and services.

``There is, for the moment, little evidence of stress in funding U.S. current account deficits,'' Greenspan said in a Berlin speech. ``To date, the widening to record levels of the U.S. ratio of current account deficit to GDP has been, with the exception of the dollar's exchange rate, seemingly uneventful.''

Greenspan also said he's ``quite optimistic'' there won't be a dollar crisis because individual economies are more flexible than in the past, and ``inflation, the typical symptom of a weak currency, appears quiescent.''

Treasury Secretary John Snow this week suggested he would resist European calls at the G-7 meeting to counter the dollar's slide, saying the value of currencies is ``best set in open, competitive markets,'' reinforcing speculation the U.S. wants a weaker dollar to foster global growth.

``What the world needs is for all G-7 currencies to fall relative to a basket of globally traded goods and services, rather than just for the dollar to fall,'' McCulley said. That will be the U.S.'s position at the G-7 meeting, he said.