page_title: Currency war
section_title: Comparison between 1932 and 21st-century currency wars
hierarchical_section_title: Currency war / Comparison between 1932 and 21st-century currency wars
caption_attribution_description: العربية: تُظهر الصُورة فلورنسا طومسون مع عدد من أطفالها، وتعرف الصُورة باسم "الأم المُهاجرة" (Migrant Mother)، نظراً لأنَّ فلورنسا قد نزحت مع أطفالها السبعة من نيبومو في كاليفورنيا، أثناء فترة الكساد الكبير، والصورة مُلتقطة في مارس 1936. في فترة الكساد الكبير وظفت هيئة الرقابة المالية عدد من المصورين لتوثيق آثار الكساد على سكان أمريكا،فقامت المصورة دوروثي لانج بالتقاط هذه الصورة، حيثُ أصبحت فلورنسا طومسون وأطفالها رمزاً للصمود في مواجهة الشدائد. English: Portrait shows Florence Thompson with several of her children in a photograph known as "Migrant Mother". The Library of Congress caption reads: "Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California." In the 1930s, the FSA employed several photographers to document the effects of the Great Depression on the population of America. Many of the photographs can also be seen as propaganda images to support the U.S. government's policy distributing support to the worst affected, poorer areas of the country. Lange's image of a supposed migrant pea picker, Florence Owens Thompson, and her family has become an icon of resilience in the face of adversity. However, it is not universally accepted that Florence Thompson was a migrant pea picker. In the book Photographing Farmworkers in California (Stanford University Press, 2004), author Richard Steven Street asserts that some scholars believe Lange's description of the print was "either vague or demonstrably inaccurate" and that Thompson was not a farmworker, but a Dust Bowl migrant. Nevertheless, if she was a "Dust Bowl migrant", she would have left a farm as most potential Dust Bowl migrants typically did and then began her life as such. Thus any potential inaccuracy is virtually irrelevant. The child to the viewer's right was Thompson's daughter, Katherine (later Katherine McIntosh), 4 years old (Leonard, Tom, "Woman whose plight defined Great Depression warns tragedy will happen again ", article, The Daily Telegraph, December 4, 2008) Lange took this photograph with a Graflex camera on large format (4"x5") negative film.[1] Español: Madre migrante, foto de Dorothea Lange, muestra a los desposeídos cosechadores de California, centrándose en Florence Owens Thompson, de 32 años, madre de 7 hijos, en Nipomo, California (marzo de 1936). Français&#160;: Portrait de Florence Owens Thompson avec plusieurs de ses enfants connu sous le titre Migrant Mother (Mère migrante), et prise par Dorothea Lange en Californie (États-Unis), en 1936. La légende originale était "Ramasseurs de pois ruinés en Californie. Mère de sept enfants, âgée de 32 ans." Selon des études ultérieures cette femme n'était pas ramasseuse de pois, mais une fermière fuyant le Dust Bowl. Elle fait partie d'une série de photographies commandées par la Farm Security Administration pour convaincre le peuple américain de la nécessité de réformes du New Deal suite à la Grande Dépression de 1929 aux États-Unis Italiano: Foto intitolata Migrant Mother, scattata da Dorothea Lange nel 1936 in California, che inquadra Florence Thompson con alcuni dei suoi sette figli, uno dei simboli della depressione economica statunitense negli anni '30. Português: Migrant Mother, Dorothea Lange, Estados Unidos, 1936 עברית: תמונה זו מכונה "אם נודדת" ובה נראית פלורנס אוונס תומפסון (Florence Owens Thompson;‏ 1903–1983), כשעל כתפיה שעונות שתי בנות והיא אוחזת בחיקה תינוקת. בטקסט המתאר את התמונה בספרית הקונגרס נכתב כך: "קוטפי אפונה נואשים בקליפורניה. אם לשבעה ילדים. בת שלושים ושתים." בשנות ה-30 של המאה ה-20 שרות הרווחה של הממשל הפדרלי בארה"ב העסיק כמה צלמים כדי לתעד את השפעת המשבר הגדול על התושבים. רבים מהצילומים מתקופה זו יכולים להיחשב גם כמעין תעמולה של הממשל, שתמך באוכלוסיה שנפגעה ביותר מהמשבר, באזורים העניים ביותר בארה"ב. הצלמת היא דורותי לנג. התמונה הפכה לסמל של יכולת העמידה האנושית נוכח המשבר הקשה. Русский: Семья сборщиков гороха в период кризиса. Фото Доротеи Ланге.
context_page_description: Currency war, also known as competitive devaluations, is a condition in international affairs where countries seek to gain a trade advantage over other countries by causing the exchange rate of their currency to fall in relation to other currencies. As the exchange rate of a country's currency falls, exports become more competitive in other countries, and imports into the country become more and more expensive. Both effects benefit the domestic industry, and thus employment, which receives a boost in demand from both domestic and foreign markets. However, the price increases for import goods are unpopular as they harm citizens' purchasing power; and when all countries adopt a similar strategy, it can lead to a general decline in international trade, harming all countries.
  Historically, competitive devaluations have been rare as countries have generally preferred to maintain a high value for their currency. Countries have generally allowed market forces to work, or have participated in systems of managed exchanges rates.
context_section_description: Both the 1930s and the outbreak of competitive devaluation that began in 2009 occurred during global economic downturns. An important difference with the 2010s is that international traders are much better able to hedge their exposures to exchange rate volatility because of more sophisticated financial markets. A second difference is that the later period's devaluations were invariably caused by nations expanding their money supplies by creating money to buy foreign currency, in the case of direct interventions, or by creating money to inject into their domestic economies, with quantitative easing. If all nations try to devalue at once, the net effect on exchange rates could cancel out, leaving them largely unchanged, but the expansionary effect of the interventions would remain. There has been no collaborative intent, but some economists such as Berkeley's Barry Eichengreen and Goldman Sachs's Dominic Wilson have suggested the net effect will be similar to semi-coordinated monetary expansion, which will help the global economy.
  James Zhan of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), however, warned in October 2010 that the fluctuations in exchange rates were already causing corporations to scale back their international investments.
  Comparing the situation in 2010 with the currency war of the 1930s, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the  Daily Telegraph suggested a new currency war may be beneficial for countries suffering from trade deficits. He noted that in the 1930s, it was countries with a big surplus that were severely impacted once competitive devaluation began. He also suggested that overly-confrontational tactics may backfire on the US by damaging the status of the dollar as a global reserve currency.
  Ben Bernanke, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, also drew a comparison with competitive devaluation in the interwar period, referring to the sterilisation of gold inflows by France and America, which helped them sustain large trade surpluses but also caused deflationary pressure on their trading partners, contributing to the Great Depression. Bernanke stated that the example of the 1930s implies that the "pursuit of export-led growth cannot ultimately succeed if the implications of that strategy for global growth and stability are not taken into account."
  In February 2013, Gavyn Davies for The Financial Times emphasized that a key difference between the 1930s and the 21st-century outbreaks is that the former had some retaliations between countries being carried out not by devaluations but by increases in import tariffs, which tend to be much more disruptive to international trade.
caption: Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange (1936). This portrait of a 32-year-old farm-worker with seven children became an iconic photograph symbolising defiance in the face of adversity. A currency war contributed to the worldwide economic hardship of the 1930s Great Depression.
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