Eurodollars (reply to Thomas)

Daniel Davies dsquared at al-islam.com
Thu Feb 7 07:10:16 PST 2002


This is a difficult one to answer because I don't know anything about Hardt and Negri. And it's also going to be short because I don't really have much to add on the Eurodollar market to Alessandro's and Viskash's excellent comments. My two eurocents:

1. Although the euro$ market goes back ages, it only really came into existence as an important phenomenon in the 1970s. This was the period during which market interest rates were going through the roof, but the Fed's Regulation Q put a ceiling on the rates which American banks could pay on deposits. There was a loophole in Reg Q, however, which exempted offshore deposits, so the euro$ market became massively attractive. This was also during the petrodollar period, so the Gulf states have to be thrown into the mix as well.

2. "Euro" dollar is a bit of a misnomer; insofar as we are talking about the eurodollar market as a significant political and economic force, it's the London market which we're interested in. I remember while working at the BoE in 1994 that we had numerous discussions about what to call the London market in euro deposits -- the natural coinage would be "Euroeuro", but we settled on "Xenoeuro".

3. I'm less than convinced that this is really a move away from state power. If the global capitalists really cared about operating outside the confines of a state, the technology certainly exists for them to have the whole thing based in the Cayman Islands or somewhere and have no tax or regulation at all. But in fact, the dealers in the eurodollar market are branches and local subsidiaries with UK charters, regulated in London by the FSA. Keeping a degree of regulation is important to the banks, because it ties the state into being the liquidity provider of last resort, for one thing.

dd

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