Tom Pepinsky

Category: Indonesia

  • The Rupiah’s Recent Troubles and the Old Currency Board Plan

    The Indonesian rupiah finds itself beset by international currency troubles. The word that jumps out to me in the Indonesian press coverage and on Twitter is anjlok, which means to plummet or to fall rapidly (see e.g. here). The last time that I saw the word anjlok used to describe the rupiah’s value this often was in old press clippings from the late 1990s, describing the Asian Financial Crisis, when the rupiah plunged from Rp2000/USD to Rp14000/USD in just a few months.

    By contrast, the current troubles don’t seem so bad.

    Source: Bloomberg

    The worry is about the latest jump in the IDR/USD exchange rate over the past two weeks, which is worrying for certain but not nearly comparable to the financial (and subsequently macroeconomic and political) catastrophe that accompanied the rupiah’s collapse in 1998.

    But it was in this context that an alert graduate student forwarded me this tweet:

    There is so much going on here.

    Take first the tweet’s author, Steve Hanke. Hanke has made a name for himself in the past thirty years as an ardent defender/proponent of the currency board system, a kind of exchange rate management institution in which a government body pledges to exchange local currency for benchmark foreign currency and keeps reserves on hand to accomplish this. Hanke is bullish on currency boards! Here he is tweeting on Turkey:

    The mind boggles at this sort of claim. It strikes me as much more credible to argue that currency boards rarely fail, or that when they fail it’s not so bad, but then again we live in the era of the Big Lie.

    The problem with any fixed exchange rate system is that without capital controls, domestic governments sacrifice macroeconomic policy autonomy (the old Mundell-Fleming Trilemma). There is nothing magical about calling the fixed exchange rate promise a “currency board” rather than “the moon and sixpence” or something else. And because currency boards are political institutions created by politicians, they are obviously inherit any credibility problem that a government might have when it faces a run on its currency. Of course, the idea behind the currency board is that the strict pledge not to interfere in the currency would itself become the source of greater credibility. But that pledge is also a political act, and requires a strong signaling and credibility logic to sustain (“only a government that’s really serious would pledge something like this, so we infer that it must be credible”).

    For Indonesia watchers, seeing Steve Hanke tweet about currency boards and Indonesia is quite the blast from the past. But there’s more! That tweet also conveys Hanke’s views about the fall of Soeharto as being not just the result of the crisis, but rather of plot by the US and the IMF to overthrow him. Why does he hold such beliefs? Because back in February 1998, Hanke was a key player in trying to convince Soeharto to implement a currency board system at the height of the crisis.

    I wrote about this a month and a half ago, in a discussion of recently declassified material from the last years of Soeharto’s New Order. Here’s President Clinton’s quote again:

    If the rupiah falls, you will lose your reserves. And if the currency board is caught short and falls, you will lose the reserves as well, just quicker.

    You can see how this sort of claim would annoy any proponent of a currency board system. In the end Soeharto didn’t go for the currency board proposal—and very clearly, both the US and the IMF were sharply critical of this proposal—but couldn’t hold onto power in the midst of dramatic economic collapse. Hanke thinks that this is evidence that the currency board would have saved Soeharto, and the rupiah too.

    If you’re wondering if Hanke maybe has a point (and he is not alone in his interpretations, see e.g. Ross McLeod here [PDF]), you might have a snicker at this February 16, 1998 article in Barron’s talking about successful examples that Indonesia might hope to emulate.

    Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan noted the currency boards in Hong Kong and Argentina have worked because “the political will and policies required” have been present.

    Hard to see how Soeharto possessed “the political will and policies required” to sustain a currency board. But this exchange rate policy footnote remains interesting when viewed with twenty years’ hindsight.

  • Psywar and Misinformation: 1965 Indonesia, 2016-? United States

    I recently had the privilege to review Geoffrey Robinson‘s The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-1966. It’s scheduled to be published promptly in March 2019 because academic publishing (although you might click here to see what happens). Anyone who happens to be reading this blog post is probably someone who would enjoy reading Robinson’s book.

    In a chapter entitled “A Gleam of Light in Asia,” Robinson describes how British and American authorities participated in a “sophisticated international propaganda and psywar operation” to blame the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) for the alleged coup against Sukarno. In the days following the murder of the six Army generals, there were plenty of skeptical voices—domestically and internationally—who doubted the claims of the PKI’s culpability or responsibility. But, writes Robinson,

    One reason the critics and skeptics were not easily heard was that information about the alleged coup and violence was deliberately skewed by a sophisticated international propaganda and psywar operation organized by British and US government agencies and their Indonesian Army friends.

    The American campaign involved

    clear direction to US agencies to stress the PKI’s alleged role in the alleged coup and emphasize its brutality, while at the same time playing down any sins of splits within the military. Following army cues, they also suggested stirring up memories of the 1948 Madiun uprising…. supplemented with reporting and commentary on the alleged (but never proven) role of China in the supposed coup and its connection with the PKI.

    On the British side, a memo from the Foreign Office

    fully endorsed the proposal for “unattributable propaganda or psy-war activities which would contribute to weakening the PKI permanently”… in which “British participation or cooperation should be carefully concealed” and the “overt…British attitude should be one of strict non-interference.”

    This was almost completely disingenuous on both the American and British parts, given the depth and extent of Western skepticism of both PKI and Chinese involvement—but it served a clear political purpose. Reading on,

    Western diplomats understood well that in the days following the purported coup, print and broadcast media had become crucial fields of political struggle…. A further element of the international psywar campaign was the cultivation of “friendly” foreign correspondents and journalists by various Western governments.

    It is not hard to see here the parallels between Western efforts to shape Indonesian politics through misinformation and media manipulation and the Russian campaign to disrupt US politics. The details have changed, of course, but the idea remains the same: stress one interpretation of politics over others, collaborate with (and support) trustworthy and likeminded media partisans, link current events to sensitive and inflammatory historical moments, and so forth.

    The big difference is the media environment, with the Indonesian Army having shut down all opposition media by October 2, 1965. Compare this to the United States, where the media is free and competitive, and where social media means that the way that most Americans consume political media is entirely different. But that just changes the tactics (Twitter bots, fake Facebook news), not the logic of psywar (distract, deflect, confuse).