"Floating rates are lower risk and lower return, " says David Battersby, investment manager at stockbrokers Redmayne-Bentley.
Depending on whether floating rates rise or fall, one will end up owing money to the other.
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But surely, their fans may say, fixed exchange rates have one important advantage: they are less volatile than floating rates.
Then the economy plunged, and the floating rates with it, leaving the banks, in some sense, the victors in the deals.
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Also, the fashion for floating rates and inflation targets took hold just as the environment for emerging economies began to improve.
The more pragmatic proponents of floating rates recognise the risks of volatility.
Europe was dogged by currency instability from the introduction of floating rates in the early 1970s to the creation of the euro in 1999.
If you don't want to take much risk and want a decent income, Libor and floating rates may be the place to go for it.
Neither fixed nor floating rates are substitutes for sound macroeconomic policies.
It also suggests why floating rates did not deter cross-border investment.
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House Education Chairman John Kline's bill sets floating rates on new Stafford loans at the 10-year Treasury rate plus 2.5%, while also protecting borrowers by capping the rates at 8.5%.
Floating rates are less vulnerable to sudden speculative crises.
But the world was left with unstable floating exchange rates and all of their troubles.
Milton Friedman was pushing floating exchange rates and saying that they would end the perpetual crisis.
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Today the world uses a system of floating exchange rates based on "fiat" or government-created money.
The IMF supports that choice, whether floating exchange rates, fixed exchange rates or dollarization.
This shift to floating exchange rates should in theory have reduced the need to hold reserves.
What makes this time different, on a global scale, however, is the reality of floating exchange rates.
Others argue that floating exchange rates make no sense for small emerging economies.
The switch to floating exchange rates has helped to propel a dramatic turnaround in Latin America's balance of payments.
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In the swaps market, in particular, it seems more attractive to receive floating interest rates and to pay fixed rates.
The example I have in mind now is my study of the international adjustment mechanisms under fixed and floating exchange rates.
These folks, and their cousins at the IMF, routinely recommend policies that are too often destructive: floating exchange rates, devaluations, higher taxes.
This was done in a regime of increasingly freer floating exchange rates.
In other words, free-floating exchange rates are probably not the best option.
Now given we live in a globalised financial market, with free-floating exchange rates and no capital controls, how would you "do" financial repression?
In industrial countries, remarkably little evidence exists to suggest that the volatility of floating exchange rates does in fact harm trade or investment.
But there is little appetite to abandon the world of floating exchange rates, while free trade talks, also encouraged at Bretton Woods, have stalled.
The new era is one in which governments are using floating exchange rates, near-zero interest rates and vast fiscal deficits to protect their economies.
Money was allowed to flow freely across borders and, in an era of floating exchange rates, the constraints on credit growth were much reduced.
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