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The outline of the paper evolved from presentations made to CEPII and the Institute for International Economics in introducing Williamson (2000), and the author is indebted to participants in those meetings, particularly Olivier Jeanne and Ernest Preeg, for stimulating comments.
Economists have long tended to debate the exchange rate question in terms of fixed versus flexible exchange rates, despite the fact that few countries practiced either of them, but chose instead one of the numerous intermediate regimes. The reason is that both of these extreme regimes fit comfortably within the profession's preferred modeling strategy. In a standard model, with exchange rates determined by the fundamentals subject only to well-behaved noise, a country may choose to use monetary policy either to pin down the price level by using the exchange rate as a nominal anchor, or it may use monetary policy to pursue "internal balance" (nowadays usually described as inflation targeting). The first strategy implies a fixed rate and the second implies a floating rate, and there is no compelling reason for doing anything else, unless perhaps a country wants to use the exchange rate as a nominal anchor but there is inflation inertia in the system, in which case a pre-determined decelerating crawl provides a useful transitional mechanism for getting to a fixed rate.
What is new is that the preference for picking one of the extremes and avoiding the middle ground has spread from professional economists to policymakers. This is surely not because economists have suddenly come to dominate economic policymaking. It is true that there has never before been a time when first-class economists have been as dominant as they are today in the United States, with Larry Summers as Secretary of the Treasury, Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve, and Stanley Fischer at the IMF. But these are not the prime movers in the emergence of the new orthodoxy which claims that the choice of exchange rate regime has been hollowed out to one of the two corners: indeed, Larry Summers worked inter alia on "noise traders" (De Long et al 1987, 1988), which is the type of model that provides the strongest logic for favoring intermediate regimes, and Stan Fischer is distinctly eclectic on this issue. Rather, what has driven the new orthodoxy is the fact that badly managed intermediate regimes have regularly fallen prey to crises, while even a well-managed intermediate regime such as that in Indonesia proved susceptible to contagion. Those of us who continue to believe that there is a case for intermediate regimes will do our cause no service if we pretend otherwise.
The present paper starts by describing the new orthodoxy, and then offers a critique. It proceeds to review the evidence that many countries that are nominally floating in fact manage their rates, and discusses why they might choose to do so. This is followed by a discussion of the relative merits of managed floating versus a more structured regime, which leads to a consideration of what a more structured regime might look like.
The New Orthodoxy
The claim of the new orthodoxy is that the choice of exchange rate regime has been hollowed out to one of two "corner solutions". One is a firmly fixed exchange rate, with an institutional guarantee that it will stay fixed, in the form of at least a currency board, or else "dollarization"1 or monetary union. The other is a floating exchange rate that is at most "lightly managed".
The key feature of a currency board is that it merely issues domestic money in exchange for foreign exchange. This implies both a fixed exchange rate and 100 percent backing of the money supply by foreign reserves. Any accretion of reserves will lead to a corresponding monetary expansion and, more crucially, any loss of reserves leads to a corresponding monetary contraction and hence to rising interest rates and deflation (Hume's price-specie-flow mechanism). The system thus has a built-in monetary mechanism that is stabilizing from the standpoint of maintaining the exchange rate. The same is true in principle of the two other forms of firmly fixed exchange rate, dollarization (in which a country gives up its seigniorage as well as its monetary sovereignty) and monetary union (in which a country agrees to share its monetary sovereignty), although these may lead to such a high degree of intra-area capital mobility as to avoid observable interest rate adjustments.
The other extreme solution that is supposed to be viable is a floating rate. No one argues that floating has to exclude all intervention in the exchange markets, but a key analytical question is what constitutes the "light management" that is supposed to be acceptable, as opposed to the heavy intervention that is proscribed. Presumably everyone agrees that episodic intervention designed to smooth erratic fluctuations is acceptable, and "leaning against the wind", in which intervention simply tries to slow a movement without concern for the level of the rate, seems also to be regarded as consistent with intervention being "light". Matters become debatable when one asks whether all intervention based on correcting perceived misalignments, i.e. determined by judgments about appropriate or inappropriate exchange rate levels, is precluded. It would seem paradoxical to exclude all such intervention on principle, given that, for example, it was precisely a concern for the weakness of the euro in terms of the dollar that recently prompted joint intervention by the Fed and the ECB (and others). The problem is that once one allows such intervention there is no hard and fast line to distinguish "light management" from an unannounced target zone. So perhaps one has to define light management as intervention that is episodic, ad hoc, not planned according to any pre-considered strategy or agreed in advance, and whose parameters are not only not announced to the market but not even known to the authorities.
The intermediate regimes that are excluded include the adjustable peg, the system embodied in the postwar system at Bretton Woods, under which a country would normally have a fixed exchange rate but reserved the right to change this in extreme circumstances ("fundamental disequilibrium"). Some of us recognized many years ago that this system was inherently vulnerable to speculative crises in a world of high capital mobility (e.g. Williamson 1965), and therefore sought to design systems that would embody enough flexibility to avoid misalignments emerging and/or to ensure that the authorities did not find themselves in the position of offering the market a one-way bet. This led to the literature of the late 1960s on crawling pegs and wider bands, and then in the 1980s to that on target zones, alias crawling bands. The system that I ended up advocating (e.g. Williamson 1996) was dubbed by Dornbusch and Park (1999) "the BBC rules", where BBC stands for basket, band, and crawl.
The "basket" part of the proposal suggested that countries with diversified trade would do better to peg to a basket that would roughly stabilize their effective exchange rate,2 rather than to a single currency. This would largely insulate countries from disturbances to trade competitiveness, output, and inflation from capricious variations in third currency exchange rates, notably the gyrations between the dollar, the euro, and the yen.
That is not to argue that every country would be well-advised to adopt a basket peg. In my study of the operation of crawling bands in Chile, Colombia, and Israel (Williamson 1996), I noted that Chile and Israel had both chosen to peg to a basket, while Colombia pegged to the dollar. I also argued that this was perfectly rational given the differences in their pattern of trade. Colombia's trade is dominated by the United States and other countries that peg to the dollar (like Venezuela), while the trade of Chile and Israel is far more diversified.
There were four purposes in suggesting a wide band (interpreted as up to +/- 10 percent, or even +/- 15 percent). One was to make sure that the authorities did not get into the no-win situation of trying to defend a disequilibrium exchange rate, given that no one imagined it would be possible to estimate the equilibrium exchange rate at all precisely. A second was to permit the parity (the center of the band) to be adjusted, to keep it in line with the fundamentals, without provoking expectations of discrete exchange rate changes that might destabilize the markets. A third was to give some scope for an independent monetary policy, to be used for anti-cyclical purposes when a country found its cycle out of sync with the world norm. The fourth was to help a country cope with strong but temporary capital inflows. As long as a band is (even partially) credible, arbitrageurs will allow for the expected reversion of the exchange rate toward its parity, and deduct an appropriate discount from (or add an appropriate premium to) the local currency yield when they compare their expected return from moving funds in with foreign yields to decide whether to place funds in the country. Moreover, investors in the tradable goods industries may tend to look at the parity rather than the market rate when assessing whether to go ahead with potential investment projects, implying that a given deviation from equilibrium will have less effect in distorting investment decisions.
The final element of the BBC formula is the crawl. This is most often used with a view to neutralizing differential inflation. It can also be used to steer inflation down over time, as was done in Israel, though this could run the risk of undermining competitiveness if pursued too dogmatically (as happened in Russia). A crawl can also be adjusted in a fast-modernizing economy in order to reflect an expectation of Balassa-Samuelson productivity bias3 and accomplish the real appreciation that such an economy requires over time in order to maintain equilibrium. Finally, the rate of crawl can be changed, or occasional small parity adjustments can be superimposed on the regular crawl, in order to facilitate needed real adjustment.
At the time of my 1996 study I was quite optimistic that this BBC regime was working well and spreading rapidly. Not only had Chile, Colombia, and Israel operated the regime with apparent success for more than 3 years, but it had also been adopted by a number of other countries, including Ecuador, Indonesia, Poland, and Russia. Since then Ecuador (which is dollarizing), Indonesia, and Russia have been forced by crises to abandon their bands, Chile and Colombia abandoned their bands voluntarily, and Israel and Poland have widened their bands to the point where they are close to de facto floating. The countries that remain with some sort of BBC arrangements are limited to Honduras, Hungary, Sri Lanka, Uruguay, and perhaps Venezuela, plus a country that boasts of having a BBC regime but does not publish the parameters, namely Singapore. Hence the plausibility of the story of the vanishing intermediate regimes.
Revealed Preference
It is indeed true that quite a number of countries, including Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Indonesia, Korea, Russia, and Thailand, have announced since the Asian crisis that they were going to allow their exchange rates to float. But two recent academic studies question whether these declarations reflect policy realities.
The first of these two papers is by Calvo and Reinhart (2000a), who analyze the behavior of exchange rates, reserves, the monetary base, and interest rates in a number of countries that describe their exchange rate regime as one of floating. They take the United States4 and Japan as providing a calibration of what may be expected in terms of the volatility of these variables under floating rates. The first two rows of table 1 show certain of their measures of volatility for the United States and Japan respectively.5 The next eight rows show the equivalent figures for eight emerging market countries that describe their regime as one of floating. Three of these describe their float as being managed, while five of them describe themselves as independently floating. The last row shows the equivalent figures for Thailand, a country that described itself as fixing its exchange rate prior to the East Asian crisis. (It was fixed to a dollar-dominated basket for the later part of the period being analyzed.)
It can be seen that most of the emerging market countries with rates described as floating had more volatility than fixed-rate Thailand but less volatility than the United States and Japan. India and Korea are closer to Thailand than to the benchmark floaters, while Malaysia, Peru, and Uganda are intermediate. Mexico and South Africa have volatility similar to that of Japan. Turkey, which describes its regime as a "managed float", actually had even more volatility than the United States. These results show no obvious relationship between volatility and whether or not a country claims to manage its float.
Observed volatility will depend not merely on a country's policies, as supposedly described by its exchange-rate regime, but also on the shocks to which it is subject. Calvo and Reinhart therefore measure also the volatility of foreign exchange reserves, to measure the extent to which a country intervenes in the market to limit movements in its exchange rate. One would expect the United States to have abnormally high volatility on this measure, inasmuch as its reserves are very modest relative to any other relevant magnitude. Nonetheless, US reserves are actually less volatile than those of any other country in the table except Japan and Malaysia. Five of the eight floaters, including three of the five independent floaters, actually show more reserve volatility than fixed-rate Thailand.
Countries may also seek to manage their exchange rate by directing monetary policy to that end. This would result in a high degree of volatility in their monetary base and/or their interest rate, i.e. in low numbers in the last two columns of table 1. All the emerging market countries except South Africa show more volatility in their monetary base than the United States, although India, Malaysia, and Peru also show less than Japan (with Thailand quite close as well). In terms of interest rate volatility, however, only Malaysia is at all comparable to the benchmark floaters.
Overall, these results suggest that few of the emerging market countries that describe themselves as having floating exchange rates are content to allow their rates to float as freely as the United States or Japan do. Malaysia appears (prior to its fix in 1998) to have done the least in terms of intervening or adjusting monetary policy to stabilize its exchange rate, but the fact that the volatility of its exchange rate is so much less than in the US or Japanese cases suggests that it may simply be subject to fewer shocks. Turkey is at the other extreme: its exchange rate has been very volatile, but so have its other policies, suggesting that it has suffered either strong shocks or frenetic policymakers. The other emerging markets all show evidence of having used either intervention or monetary policy or both in order to limit exchange rate volatility.6 In the phrase of Calvo and Reinhart, they exhibit "fear of floating".
The second of the two papers is by McKinnon (2000), who focuses exclusively on East Asia. He examines the extent to which daily changes in the exchange rates of 9 East Asian currencies vis-a-vis the Swiss franc can be explained by changes of each of the three main currencies (dollar, yen, and DM) in terms of the Swiss franc (which is intended to be a neutral numeraire). He shows (see table 2) that prior to the East Asian crisis the movements of each East Asian currency (relative to the numeraire) were dominated, with R-squares generally over 0.9, by the movements of the dollar (relative to the numeraire); i.e., that the currencies were effectively pegged to the dollar, as was indeed widely surmised. He goes on to examine the situation during the crisis, and finds that all the currencies except the Chinese renminbi and the Hong Kong dollar were genuinely floating, with only a modest part of their daily movements explained by changes in the dollar during that period. The really interesting finding concerns the post-crisis period, from January 1999 to May of 2000. It turns out that not only Malaysia (which formally pegged to the dollar in September 1998) but five of the other East Asian currencies examined - all except Indonesia -- have reverted to a policy of essentially pegging to the dollar (with R-squares of over 0.6, up to almost 0.9, a result statistically indistinguishable from the situation prior to the crisis).
These results strongly suggest that most emerging market countries - especially those in East Asia - are reluctant floaters. Their revealed preference is for a regime that can at most be described as one of heavily managed floating. They describe themselves as floating because that is what the IMF wants to hear, but they do not practice floating in a form that would be approved by the two-corners advocates.
Explaining Behavior
Why might emerging market policymakers have such a preference? Do they not understand the arguments, of a clear policy assignment and of lesser vulnerability to crises, that have led Western economists to tell them they should go to one of the two corner solutions?
There is another hypothesis, beside a lack of intellectual understanding, that can explain their revealed preference: that they do not like how they see floating rates behave. They see the gyrations among the dollar, euro, yen, and pound, and wish to avoid being subjected to similar pressures. They saw how the market undervalued their own currencies when they allowed these to float during the crisis, and fear that they may well overshoot on the upside as recovery proceeds. In other words, perhaps they see gains in an intermediate regime that they believe outweigh the costs in terms of greater vulnerability to crises and having less simple policy rules to follow. Perhaps it is Western economists who deserve censure for having ignored the costs of going to the two corners, rather than emerging market policymakers who are being obtuse.
What I have always regarded as the primary benefit of an intermediate regime is that it allows policy to be directed to limiting misalignments, which is something that cannot be claimed by either of the corners. Fixed rates allowed currencies to become overvalued as a result of higher inflation than abroad (or occasionally undervalued through better success in controlling inflation) in the days of Bretton Woods. Floating rates have often led to even more pronounced misalignments, as currencies have lost touch with the fundamentals: think of sterling in 1981, the dollar in 1985, the yen in 1995, or the euro today for a few of the most dramatic examples. Such misalignments are damaging: overvaluations destroy tradable good industries, undervaluations cause stagflation. The particular danger that worries me about the current attempt to impose floating on emerging markets is that this will prevent them maintaining competitive exchange rates, which most analysts have judged were a key precondition for the success of the export-oriented strategies of the East Asian countries during the decades of the Miracle.
Calvo and Reinhart (2000b) offer a longer list of reasons as to why emerging markets may be unwise to float, even if one believes that floating is a good choice for industrial countries. Devaluation is typically contractionary in emerging markets in the short run, which is less likely to be true in industrial countries. Exchange rate volatility is more damaging to export performance. The pass-through from devaluation to an acceleration in inflation is typically larger. Many emerging markets (especially in Latin America) have large dollar-denominated liabilities, whose domestic currency value is inflated by devaluation, eroding net worth in the financial and corporate sectors, and in extreme cases (as in East Asia) inflicting widespread bankruptcy. All these stylized facts are confirmed empirically in their paper. Given the random behavior that we know governs the behavior of a floating exchange rate (Meese and Rogoff 1983), there would seem to be a strong case for seeking an alternative regime.7
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal (Malpass 2000) argued that Brazil's recent economic progress can be attributed to an act of unsterilized intervention in October 1999 which arrested the slide of the real and created the conditions for inflation and subsequently interest rates to decline (the latter to the lowest level for many years). The Central Bank of Brazil explains that act of intervention as having been a one-off operation designed to reassure nervous investors that Y2K was not going to demolish the Brazilian economy. Doubtless that is an accurate description of the concerns that motivated the intervention, but, if the alternative would indeed have been a continuing euro-like slide of the real, one has to be thankful that the Central Bank of Brazil found a pretext for breaking its practice of not intervening.
In addition to the need to recognize that intermediate regimes offer benefits as well as costs, a critic of the new orthodoxy can also argue that its proponents are claiming too much when they imply that the corners are invulnerable to crises. Consider first the case of a currency board. A currency board always has enough reserves to cover M0, the monetary base. But foreign exchange reserves equal to M0 are not enough to cover all of M3, and therefore they are not large enough to cover all potential demands in the event of a catastrophic loss of confidence that results in capital flight. Since a failure to convert M3 into M0 on demand would constitute a monetary crisis even more severe than a failure to convert M0 on demand into dollars, it is wrong to believe that a foreign reserve at least the size of M0 makes a crisis impossible.
So far such a crisis has not happened. Currency boards have allowed a run on the currency to raise interest rates, which provides an automatic stabilizing feedback that discourages further withdrawals. But that mechanism works only as long as the public has confidence that the exchange rate will be sustained. If and when some currency board is overwhelmed, as Argentina presumably feared was about to happen when it started talking of dollarization in 1998, the confidence that has so far underpinned currency boards will evaporate overnight. If that ever happens, it is not clear that currency boards will be much more stable than any other form of pegged exchange rate in which the central bank plays by the gold standard rules of the game by tightening monetary policy when reserves decline. And even countries with currency boards whose currencies have survived speculative crises have suffered crises in their real economies (think of Argentina in 1995 or 1999 or Hong Kong in 1998, which suffered the fifth most severe recession in East Asia, after Indonesia, Korea, Thailand, and Malaysia).
Consider next the case of a floating exchange rate. It is true that a country with a floating rate can never be forced into a change in exchange rate regime, because it can always allow its currency to collapse further. But a currency collapse can still produce acute stagflation, as happened in East Asia in 1997. It was, after all, the collapse of those currencies after they were set free to float that generated the balance sheet problems that made the crisis so severe. The plausible claim made for floating is that borrowers would not make the mistake of failing to hedge if they were not being tempted into imprudence by official assurances that the exchange rate is effectively fixed. But if they ever did become equally exposed, and the exchange rate subsequently collapsed, the consequences would be just as severe as they were in East Asia in 1997. This may be less likely, but it would be complacent to deny the possibility that one day the markets could come to believe that country X has entered a new era which provides assurance that its markets and its currency can only rise. Once again, therefore, we cannot rule out the possibility that a corner solution may permit a crisis to develop.
To say that crises are still possible at either of the corners is not to claim that they are as likely as with an intermediate regime. On the contrary, it is entirely likely that Argentina's crisis would have been worse without its currency board, and that Australia, the Philippines, South Africa, or Turkey would have succumbed had their rates not been floating. The objective is merely to get a more realistic estimate of the magnitude of the benefits of going to the corners, to weigh against the costs that we discussed earlier and that have been so neglected by the advocates the two-corners solution.
Forms of Intermediate Regime
The countries that say they are floating but betray evidence of "fearing floating" would doubtless describe their regimes as "managed floating". If in practice they use this regime to stave off misalignments, one might ask what is wrong with that? Would not a regime of managed floating that was used in this way be a perfectly sensible choice, that could be used to combat misalignments in normal times but permit a quick and easy exit from commitments (since there would not be any) when a potential crisis is brewing?
I would certainly regard such a regime as vastly better than a fixed rate8 or a freely floating rate, and better than a lightly managed rate. But there are three reasons that suggest to me that such a system is likely to be inferior to a more structured regime.
First, the regime is not transparent. It is not just that we have come to regard transparency as a good thing in its own right, but also that it is difficult for the public to know whether the policy being pursued is indeed one of seeking to limit misalignments from a sensible estimate of the equilibrium rate if the public is not told the parameters of exchange rate policy. This makes it possible for governments to pursue less enlightened policies, like trying to defend a fixed rate for some outdated historical reason, without being subjected to scrutiny, or at least not until the policy has resulted in a crisis. Of course, while transparency seems an obvious virtue to most of us, it does not necessarily appeal to the officials who are required to be transparent. To them a system of untransparent managed floating may well have great appeal, inasmuch as it makes it difficult to hold them accountable sine there is no clear test that their policies have failed.
A second disadvantage of managed floating is that it precludes some types of policy cooperation, and may indeed permit policy conflict. A clear example of the type of policy cooperation that might make sense but that would be precluded by a managed float is a peg to a common basket, which I have argued (Williamson 2000) would be attractive in East Asia in order to avoid competitive devaluations, given how competitive those economies are with each other. The sort of policy conflict that would not be constrained is competitive devaluation, i.e., each of several closely competitive countries seeking targets for their exchange rate that give them a competitive edge over their rivals.
The third disadvantage of unstructured managed floating, with no announcement of the parameters guiding the management, is potentially the most serious, although quite possibly dormant at the moment. I refer to the analysis first formalized in Paul Krugman's (1991) classic paper on target zones. His model suggests that the expectation of intervention at the margin should make speculators act in a stabilizing way. In some ways the evidence has not been kind to this model: for example, exchange rates in band systems do not spend most of their time close to the edge of the band, as his model predicts (Svensson 1992, p.128).9 A possible explanation for this is that authorities intervene within bands as well as at the margins. This suggests that a more appropriate test of the efficacy of bands is whether they are effective in inducing mean-reverting behavior by market participants. The evidence shows that, under a floating exchange rate, a change in the spot exchange rate is normally associated with an almost identical change in the forward rate (Svensson 1992, p. 132), signifying that there is a virtually complete lack of any market expectation that the exchange rate will revert toward an equilibrium level within any time horizon relevant to market participants. Matters appear to be different in the presence of an exchange rate band. While bands do not normally have full credibility, and while they sometimes lack any credibility at all, the evidence from the ERM shows that when a rate moved within the band the forward rate normally changed by less than the spot rate, indicating that the market expected that the spot rate would tend to revert back toward the center of the band (Svensson 1992, pp. 132-33). The obvious explanation is that the band usually performed the function of crystallizing market expectations of where the equilibrium rate lay, and thus made expectations stabilizing at the time horizons relevant for influencing market behavior. This is the fundamental reason for preferring a band system rather than allowing the exchange rate to float.
Another important paper in establishing the potential value of a band is that of Andrew Rose (1996), who showed that a band has a pronounced effect in limiting exchange rate variability. Indeed, he argued that the primary difference between exchange-rate regimes lies not in macroeconomic fundamentals, whether one might wish to interpret these as cause or consequence of the regime, but in the noisiness of the exchange rate. He showed that this is not because some other variable, like the interest rate, jumps around much more in order to keep the exchange rate stable; on the contrary, the increased exchange rate stability is essentially a free good. In a subsequent paper, Jeanne and Rose (1999) try to explain these stylized facts by the way in which a floating exchange rate attracts noise traders, who make money by introducing noise into the exchange market. (The most plausible theory of where these profits come from is that of Krugman and Miller, 1993, who postulate that they come from stop-loss traders, who essentially buy insurance against big exchange-rate movements.) If the authorities pursue policies that suppress the volatility, the noise traders will find life uninteresting and go elsewhere in search of greener pastures, i.e. noisier markets.
Nowadays many officials appear to believe the exact opposite of the Krugman/Rose logic. Edges to bands are alleged to provide the market with targets to attack, rather than assuring the market that the rate will not move further. One reason that might make sense of this is that on altogether too many occasions authorities have attempted to defend rates that were misaligned, which allows a clear speculative profit from a successful attack.10 It appears that Colombia abandoned its band not because of an attack or a belief that its band had become misaligned, but because its authorities concluded that the mere presence of a band was undermining confidence and making it harder rather than easier to keep the exchange rate in a sensible range. And it seems that Singapore's BBC regime survived the East Asian crisis because it was not announced, and thus permitted the authorities to allow a depreciation in response to strong market pressures without any trauma in the market.
We badly need an authoritative empirical analysis of whether and under what circumstances bands are stabilizing versus destabilizing, which is able to reconcile the evidence that bands played a stabilizing role in the EMS context with their apparent failure to do so in many emerging markets. For the moment, the natural presumption is that bands are stabilizing when credible but can become destabilizing when credibility is lost. If correct, this suggests two things. The first is that any new arrangements must make a priority of avoiding commitments that will further erode credibility. The second is that it may be necessary to build credibility through unannounced but successful policy on the Singapore model before trying to capture the full benefits of an intermediate regime through public announcement.
Three Viable Intermediate Regimes
Consider the first of those two issues. What intermediate arrangements could provide some structure that might ultimately focus expectations in a stabilizing way while avoiding the crisis vulnerability that has progressively eroded credibility in past years?
Of the three features of the BBC regime, it is the existence of a band, rather than the use of a basket to insulate the effective exchange rate against the vagaries of the dollar-euro-yen cross rates or the use of a crawl to neutralize differential inflation, that makes intermediate regimes potentially crisis-prone. Thus it is modifying the obligation to intervene at the edge of the band that needs to be examined. Three possibilities merit discussion: reference rates, soft bands, and monitoring bands.
The Reference Rate Proposal. Shortly after the advent of generalized floating in 1973, it was suggested by Ethier and Bloomfield (1975) that the authorities of countries with floating exchange rates should undertake a commitment not to push their currencies away from an agreed estimate of the equilibrium exchange rate. The concept of an equilibrium exchange rate that they had in mind was pretty much the same as that which I subsequently termed the "fundamental equilibrium exchange rate" (Williamson 1985), and it is this which they called the "reference rate". The authorities would have no obligation to intervene to defend that rate, but simply a requirement to avoid intervening, or conducting other policies intended to influence the exchange rate, in a way that would push the market rate away from this reference rate. The Guidelines for Floating adopted by the IMF in 1974 had actually included reference to "some target zone of rates within the range of reasonable estimates of the medium-term norm", and legitimized aggressive intervention to push the rate toward such a zone provided it had been endorsed by the Fund. But in the mid-1970s the United States Treasury was run by ideological floaters who thought it wrong for governments to try and think where exchange rates ought to be, and so the reference rate proposal got dismissed from discussion along with the target zones of the Guidelines when the Second Amendment to the Fund's Articles blessed laissez-faire in exchange rate policy.
It is obvious that the reference rate proposal could never push a government into defending a rate in a way that would induce a crisis, since it implies no obligation to defend any rate at all. Indeed, it was originally presented as a means of disciplining intervention in a floating-rate system rather than as a distinct intermediate regime: its only claim to inclusion in the latter is that it requires the authorities to analyze where they believe equilibrium rates are, and announce their conclusions. But this is precisely what, in a carefully argued paper, Pisani-Ferry and Coeure (1999) identified as one of the key needs for improving traditional surveillance.
Soft Margins. In my first extensive development of the case for 'target zones' (Williamson 1985), I suggested that they might have 'soft margins' or 'soft buffers'. The idea was that there should not be an absolute government commitment to defend the edges of the zones, but rather that, in the event of strong speculative pressures, the government should have the right to announce that it would let the rate go outside the band, while warning the market that it planned to direct policy to bringing the rate back within the band as and when that might prove possible. This proposal rather got lost in the discussion of the late 1980s, but it has recently been revived in two analytical contributions by Bartolini and Prati (1997, 1998).
Bartolini and Prati formalize the notion of a "soft" target zone as one in which the authorities target a moving average of current and past market exchange rates to remain within a defined band, as opposed to targeting the market exchange rate to remain within a defined zone at all times. In their second paper they specify the objective as being to keep the geometric average, with exponentially decreasing weights, within the defined band. The effect is to allow the exchange rate to move outside the band in the short run, while maintaining the obligation to hold it within the band in the long run. Bartolini and Prati show that such a policy change can be expected to defuse tensions, especially when shocks to "the fundamentals" are short-lived, so that such a softening of the target zone makes the system significantly less vulnerable to speculative pressure. And they argue that such a policy change was essentially what happened in the ERM after the crisis of August 1993, and observe that it actually did succeed in defusing tension in the case of the ERM, where exchange rates rapidly returned to their former narrow bands after the widening of the margins.
As already argued, the basic logic for seeking an intermediate exchange rate system that motivates this paper is the fear that freely floating exchange rates are "badly behaved", i.e. prone to losing touch with the fundamentals, or to becoming misaligned. There is at present no formal way of modeling of this type of behavior. Temporary deviations of the fundamentals from their normal values, as hypothesized by Bartolini and Prati, seem about as good a way of introducing such behavior into formal models as we have at this time. Their results suggest that soft buffers to a target zone would be a feasible way of making an intermediate regime more robust to speculative shocks.
A recent paper of Goodhart and Delargy (1998) compares the East Asian crisis with a number of crises under the classical gold standard. It argues that one of the factors that helped countries recover under the classical gold standard was the widespread expectation that the exchange rate would revert to its pre-crisis parity once the crisis was over, which avoided widespread insolvencies such as resulted from magnification of the burden of foreign debt when the East Asian currencies were devalued. This is a feature that could be replicated by a target zone with soft margins: in a crisis the currency could be allowed to depreciate, perhaps with some internationally sanctioned right to suspend debt service until normality had been restored, but the expectation would be that the rate would return to its target zone as a part of the process of crisis resolution. McKinnon (2000) endorses the same approach, which he dubs the "restoration rule".
Monitoring Bands. A more recent proposal comes from a committee in India chaired by Mr. S.S. Tarapore, a former deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India (Tarapore Committee 1997). The committee was charged with considering the case for India to move to capital account convertibility.11 One of their suggestions was that capital account convertibility should be accompanied by the adoption of a 'monitoring band' as a framework for exchange-rate management. The center of the monitoring band, which they called the "neutral real effective exchange rate", would again represent an official, and announced, estimate of the equilibrium exchange rate. Within some range around that (they suggested plus or minus five percent), there should be a rule that the central bank would not intervene in the market. But once the rate went outside that band, on either side, it would be allowed to intervene: indeed, there could be some presumption that intervention would normally be appropriate. But, once again, there would be no obligation to intervene, thus again avoiding the commitment to defend a publicly announced margin which has proved such a problem in provoking speculative attacks.
All these three proposals would require the authorities to reveal the nature of the policy they are pursuing, would allow them to coordinate actions among themselves where that is desired, and would provide guidance to the market which, to the extent the authorities command credibility, could be expected to help stabilize rates. But none of them would commit the authorities to defend a Maginot line and thus risk their credibility if a crisis develops. All of them would permit the stabilizing properties of the restoration rule to be exploited in limiting the impact of a crisis. Thus any one of them could provide the basis for a viable intermediate regime even under the conditions of high capital mobility now present in most emerging markets.
What sort of policies would be used in conjunction with such a regime in order to help stabilize rates in the vicinity of the announced parity, and thus build credibility? The basic presumption of such a system is that monetary policy would generally be used for domestic purposes (e.g. for targeting inflation), leaving sterilized intervention as the main instrument for exchange rate management. Obviously that can only be expected to work if the chosen parity is somewhere in the vicinity of the equilibrium rate: no exchange-rate system should be expected to hold a seriously undervalued or overvalued rate. If sterilized intervention proves inadequate and the authorities decide that the parity is indeed appropriate, the next thing they need to examine is whether monetary policy could be adjusted in a way that would push the exchange rate toward the parity without disrupting domestic macroeconomic objectives. That will be more likely if there is enough flexibility in fiscal policy to permit a compensating fiscal adjustment when needed to preserve internal balance. If even that proves insufficient, then it will make sense to think of capital controls, preferably of the price-related, Chilean variety, and preferably on inflows rather than outflows.
It is time to turn briefly to the second implication drawn at the end of the previous section: "that it may be necessary to build credibility through unannounced but successful policy on the Singapore model before trying to capture the full benefits of an intermediate regime through public announcement." Too much credibility has been squandered in recent years on exchange rate regimes that proved not to be viable for one to have confidence that a jump into a new regime would carry credibility. It will be a pity to have to postpone the day when a country can expect to realize the gains of policy coordination and reap the Krugman-style benefits of making speculation more stabilizing, but it is better to postpone them than to rule them out indefinitely.
Concluding Remarks
In case it is not obvious, let me conclude by emphasizing that the view of the foreign exchange market that underlies this paper is that it is a market dominated by noise, fads, bubbles, and irrationality, rather than the rational forward-looking expectations embodied in the models of the market that we teach our students but know do not work. It is a market in which technical analysts make money by treating the trend as their friend. It has even been suggested that chaos theory would be a useful tool to analyze this market. The problem is that no one has an incentive to take a long-term view that pins exchange rates down to the fundamentals unless governments take on that role. What I have sought to do is sketch ways in which they might do that without thereby exposing themselves to the risk of precipitating a crisis. The major part of the answer is to run a BBC regime properly, but I have argued that this needs to be complemented by eliminating in one way or another the hard edges to the band that at times serve to provide markets with targets to attack.
These issues matter. The costs of foreign exchange crises are crystal clear. There now seems to be growing evidence that exchange rate volatility harms investment, and hence one must assume that it is bad for growth. indeed there are already some findings to that effect. For example, Marcel Fratzscher (1998) concluded that his "empirical results reveal that what matters for economic growth is not the mere adoption of a particular exchange rate regime but the commitment and credibility of a government to actually sustain a particular exchange rate regime over an extended period of time. The striking finding is that although countries with stable currencies grow faster overall, they also crash harder when exchange rates have to be realigned." The intermediate regimes discussed in this paper are designed to provide enough stability to capture most of the growth benefits that stability at a competitive rate offers, while incorporating enough flexibility to avoid hard crashes and the squandering of credibility that they entail. It is too soon to surrender to the current orthodoxy which holds that this is a hopeless quest.
Table 1: Measures of volatility in countries with floating exchange rates
Country | Regime description | Probability of monthly changes within +/- 1 percent | Probability of monthly change in base interest rate being less than 25 points | ||
Exchange rate | Foreign exchange reserves | Monetary basis | |||
United States, 1973-99 | Float | 26.81 | 28.6 | 42.1 | 59.7 |
Japan, 1973-99 | Float | 33.8 | 44.8 | 22.7 | 67.9 |
India, 1993-99 | Float | 82.2 | 21.6 | 27.4 | 6.4 |
Korea, 1980-97 | Managed float | 80.1 | 16.1 | 12.3 | 31.1 |
Malaysia, 1992-98 | Managed float | 59.4 | 34.3 | 24.3 | 66.7 |
Mexico, 1994-99 | Float | 34.6 | 13.2 | 5.7 | 8.3 |
Peru, 1990-99 | Float | 45.2 | 23.1 | 22.9 | 24.8 |
South Africa, 1983-99 | Float | 32.8 | 8.7 | 45.4 | 35.6 |
Turkey, 1980-99 | Managed float | 12.6 | 10.3 | 12.2 | 3.4 |
Uganda, 1992-99 | Float | 52.9 | 17.7 | 15.6 | 11.6 |
Thailand, 1970-97 | Fix | 93.6 | 21.3 | 19.8 | 24.1 |
Source: Calvo and Reinhart (2000a).
Note 1. DM/dollar
Table 2: The evolution of dollar pegging in East Asia, 1994-2000
Pre-crisis period | Crisis period | Post-crisis period | |||||||||
Country | USD coefficient | S.E. | R-square | USD coefficient | S.E. | R-square | USD coefficient | S.E. | R-square | ||
China | 0.996 | 0.003 | 0.995 | 1.001 | 0.000 | 1.000 | 1.000 | 0.000 | 1.000 | ||
Hong Kong | 1.000 | 0.002 | 0.998 | 1.000 | 0.003 | 0.998 | 0.998 | 0.001 | 1.000 | ||
Indonesia | 0.999 | 0.008 | 0.965 | 0.550 | 0.388 | 0.038 | 0.848 | 0.163 | 0.182 | ||
Korea | 1.021 | 0.016 | 0.883 | 1.086 | 0.226 | 0.087 | 0.957 | 0.045 | 0.706 | ||
Malaysia | 0.886 | 0.014 | 0.889 | 0.755 | 0.138 | 0.161 | 1.000 | 0.000 | 1.000 | ||
Philippines | 0.987 | 0.018 | 0.836 | 0.788 | 0.125 | 0.196 | 0.945 | 0.040 | 0.741 | ||
Singapore | 0.817 | 0.012 | 0.905 | 0.727 | 0.061 | 0.447 | 0.818 | 0.026 | 0.848 | ||
Thailand | 0.955 | 0.012 | 0.923 | 0.688 | 0.165 | 0.107 | 0.858 | 0.049 | 0.639 | ||
Taiwan | 1.015 | 0.012 | 0.928 | 0.930 | 0.050 | 0.552 | 0.986 | 0.024 | 0.883 | ||
Source: McKinnon (2000, Tables 5-7)
Pre-crisis period is Jan. 1994-May 1997
Crisis period is June 1997-Dec. 1998
Post-crisis period is Jan. 1999-May 2000
USD= US dollar
Balassa, Bela (1964), "The Purchasing Power Parity Doctrine: A Reappraisal", Journal of Political Economy 72.
Bartolini, Leonardo, and Alessandro Prati (1997), "Soft versus Hard Targets for Intervention", Economic Policy, April.
Bartolini, Leonardo, and Alessandro Prati (1998), "Soft Exchange Rate Bands and Speculative Attacks: Theory, and Evidence from the ERM since August 1993", IMF Working Paper 98/156.
Calvo, Guillermo A. (2000), "The Case for Hard Pegs", presentation to a conference on "To Dollarize or not to Dollarize" at the North-South Institute in Ottawa on 4-5 October.
Calvo, Guillermo A., and Carmen M. Reinhart (2000a), "Fear of Floating". Mimeo. University of Maryland.
Calvo, Guillermo A., and Carmen M. Reinhart (2000b), "Fixing for Your Life", paper presented to the Brookings Trade forum 2000, "policy Challenges in the Next Century", Washington, 27-28 April.
De Long, J. Bradford, Andrei Shleiffer, Lawrence H. Summers, and Robert J. Waldmann (1987), "The Economic Consequences of Noise Traders", NBER Working Paper no. 2395, October.
De Long, J. Bradford, Andrei Shleiffer, Lawrence H. Summers, and Robert J. Waldmann (1988), "The Survival of Noise Traders in Financial Markets", NBER Working Paper no. 2715, September.
Dornbusch, Rudiger, and Yung Chul Park (1999). "Flexibility or Nominal Anchors?", in S. Collignon, J. Pisani-Ferry, and Y.C. Park, eds., Exchange Rate Policies in Emerging Asian Economies. New York: Routledge.
Ethier, Wilfred, and Arthur I. Bloomfield (1975), Managing the Managed Float, Princeton Essays in International Finance no.112.
Fratzscher, Marcel (1998), "The Impact of Exchange Rate Regimes and Stability on Macroeconomic Performance: An Empirical Analysis", mimeo.
Goodhart, Charles, and P.J.R. Delargy (1998), "Financial Crises: Plus ca Change, plus c'est la Meme Chose", International Finance 1(2), 261-87.
Jeanne, Olivier, and Andrew Rose (1999), "Noise Trading and Exchange Rate Regimes", NBER Working Paper no. W7104.
Krugman, Paul (1991), "Target Zones and Exchange Rate Dynamics", Quarterly Journal of Economics, 106(3), August.
Krugman, Paul, and Marcus Miller (1993), "Why Have a Target Zone?", Carnegie-Rochester Series on Public Policy 38, 279-314.
Malpass, David (2000), "The Americas: This Time, Maybe Brazil Really Does Have a Future", Wall Street Journal, 21 July.
McKinnon, Ronald I. (2000), "After the Crisis, the East Asian Dollar Standard Resurrected: An Interpretation of High-Frequency Exchange-Rate Pegging", paper presented to a conference of the ASEAN Economic Associations in Singapore on 7-8 September.
Meese, Richard, and Kenneth Rogoff (1983), "Empirical Exchange Rate Models of the 1970s: Do They Fit Out of Sample?", Journal of International Economics, 14.
Ortiz, Guillermo, and Agustin Carstens (2000), "The Experience with a Floating Exchange Rate Regime: The Case of Mexico", paper presented to a conference on "International Financial Markets: The Challenge of Globalization" at Texas A and M University, 31 March.
Pisani-Ferry, Jean, and Benoit Coeure (1999), "The Exchange-Rate Regime Among Major Currencies", paper presented to the IMF Conference on Key Issues in Reform of the International Monetary and Financial System, Washington, May 28-29.
Rose, Andrew (1996), "Exchange Rate Volatility, Monetary Policy, and Capital Mobility: Empirical Evidence on the Holy Trinity", Journal of International Money and Finance,
Samuelson, Paul A. (1964), "Theoretical Notes on Trade Problems", Review of Economics and Statistics, 46.
Schulstad, Paul, and Angel Serrat (1995), An Empirical Examination of a Multilateral Target Zone Model (Banco de Espana: Documento de Trabajo no. 9532).
Svensson, Lars E.O. (1992), "An Interpretation of Recent Research on Exchange Rate Target Zones", Journal of Economic Perspectives, 6(4), Fall. Tarapore Committee (1997), Report of the Committee on Capital Account Convertibility (Mumbai: Reserve Bank of India).
Williamson, John (1965), The Crawling Peg, Princeton Essays in International Finance no. 50.
Williamson, John (1972), "Another Case of Profitable Destabilizing Speculation", Journal of International Economics, 2, pp.77-84.
Williamson, John (1985), The Exchange Rate System (Washington: Institute for International Economics; revised edition).
Williamson, John (1996), The Crawling Band as an Exchange Rate Regime: Lessons from Chile, Colombia, and Israel (Washington: Institute for International Economics).
Williamson, John (2000), Exchange Rate Regimes for Emerging Markets: Reviving the Intermediate Option (Washington: Institute for International Economics).
1. Using that term generically to signify unilateral adoption of a foreign currency to serve as the domestic currency, e.g. to include Montenegro's proposed adoption of the deutschemark/euro.
2. An "effective exchange rate" is the weighted average exchange rate against all currencies, where the weights are generally chosen to reflect the pattern of trade. (An alternative weighting system, based on trade elasticities, recognizes that countries are also important competitors, rather than just trade partners.) A "real effective exchange rate" corrects by changes in relative inflation, so that the index does not change if prices increase as much at home as the weighted average of the country's trading partners.
3. See Balassa (1964) and Samuelson (1964). Chile built a 2 percent per annum real appreciation to reflect this factor into the formula for its crawl from 1995 to 1999.
4. The US exchange rate is taken as the dollar-deutschemark rate.
5. They calculate other measures as well, e.g. for the probability of monthly changes in the first three variables falling within a range of +/- 2.5 percent rather than +/- 1 percent, but the general picture is not greatly changed by examining any of these other measures.
6. The Mexicans argue that their monetary policy is guided not by a concern to manage the exchange rate, but by their inflation target. A depreciation of the peso threatens to increase inflation, which causes them to raise interest rates (Ortiz and Carstens 2000.) It is not clear, however, how this can explain the reserve volatility as well as the volatility in base money and interest rates.
7. Calvo, at least, believes that the best such alternative is the other corner, namely a fixed exchange rate: see eg Calvo (2000). I presume that the standard critique of fixed exchange rates will be presented in the paper of Andres Velasco to this conference.
8. For most countries. I agree that there are certain circumstances - when a country is small and open, when its trade is focused on a single currency area, when it is comfortable with the macro policy of its large neighbor, and when it is unlikely to experience sharp real shocks different to its neighbor - when fixing in terms of that neighbor's currency is a good policy choice.
9. However, Schulstad and Serrat (1995) have argued that the conventional bilateral model of a target zone is a poor way to model the ERM. Their multilateral model of a target zone appears to fit the ERM data much better, without any need to invoke intra-marginal intervention.
10. Traditional theory implies that a "successful" attack on a correctly aligned band cannot be expected to bring profit to the speculators collectively. For example, a rate that is pushed to an undervalued level by a speculative attack will result in a surplus on non-speculative transactions, so that the rate would return to the band if the speculators tried collectively to move back into the currency they had sold so as to realize their paper gains. One possible critique of this theory is that, because of the J-curve effect, the surplus on non-speculative transactions will only materialize with delay, so that the speculators might be able to realize their profits by getting in while the non-speculative account is still in the red (Williamson 1972). Furthermore, second-generation crisis models imply that a well-aligned band might become misaligned as a consequence of the attack itself, which could again make sense of the view that bands provide targets to attack.
11. Incidentally, they recommended in May of 1997 that India should try to establish capital account convertibility within three years. But they also laid down some preconditions, like fiscal discipline and solvent banks, which many observers judged India would be unlikely to fulfill within three years even in the absence of the East Asian crisis, so their advice was not as reckless as it may sound in the aftermath of that crisis.


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Over 1 million Americans are seeking treatment for substance use disorder—here's how it breaks down in South Dakota
This story originally appeared on Zinnia Health and was produced and distributed in partnership with Stacker Studio.
Over 1 million Americans are seeking treatment for substance use disorder—here's how it breaks down in South Dakota
In 2020, more than 41 million Americans were classified as needing treatment for substance use, including 28 million with alcohol use disorder, 18 million with an illicit drug use disorder, and 6.5 million with both, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
Over 97% of those 41 million did not believe that treatment was necessary. Perhaps this is, in part, why on a given day in 2020, just 2.7% of people were receiving treatment, including hospital inpatients, non-hospital residential clients, and outpatient clients who were seen at a facility for a substance use treatment, detoxification, or methadone or buprenorphine maintenance, or naltrexone treatment.
Citing one-day census data from the National Survey of Substance Abuse Treatment Services and state population data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Zinnia Health identified the total number who received treatment—1,090,357 people (328.5 per 100,000) nationally, including 39,271 patients under 18— in each state and Washington D.C. This survey was taken on March 31, 2020, amid the start of COVID-19-related shutdowns. This is likely a contributing factor for states that saw significant decreases in people seeking treatment.
Those suffering from substance use disorders (SUD) have been severely impacted by the pandemic. According to the National Council for Behavioral Health, 54% of facilities that offered SUD services were shut down in September 2020, and 65% of those that remained open had to disrupt vital, often life-saving, services due to financial and operational hardships. From alcohol to opioids, substance use was both a way to cope with, and a behavior exacerbated by, the pandemic. In March 2020, opioid overdoses jumped 18% compared to the same period the previous year. Overdose deaths involving any drug rose by 30% in the first year of the pandemic.
Since the 1990s, opioids have been at the forefront of the substance use crisis in America—a deadly problem so pervasive that it is lowering the average life expectancy of Americans at a rate not previously seen since the country simultaneously faced World War I and the 1918 influenza pandemic. In the past 22 years, more than 1 million people have died of a drug overdose, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
Opioids began as an imperfect solution to pain management, followed by a period of negligent, profit-driven practices of false marketing and over-prescribing by physicians and pharmaceutical companies like Purdue Pharma. When newly imposed regulations made prescription painkillers too expensive or too difficult to get, heroin use—and related deaths—increased.
While statistics around SUDs are often grim, the most important statistic is a positive one. Recent studies have shown that 75% of people with a SUD eventually enter recovery. Read on to see how the rates of people seeking treatment and the number of facilities providing SUD services have changed over the decade in your state, or check out the national story here.
South Dakota by the numbers
- Patients seeking treatment: 2,864 (-4.1% change since 2011)
--- Patients seeking treatment per 100k residents: 323.0 (-1.7% lower than national average)
- Patients under 18 seeking treatment: 195 (-54.7% change since 2011)
- Total facilities: 58 (0.0% change since 2011)
Today, America finds itself in a third wave, or iteration, of the opioid epidemic. This wave is characterized by a rise in usage and overdose deaths from deadlier synthetic opioids like fentanyl—a substance 50 times stronger than heroin. From 2013 to 2019, the synthetic opioid-involved death rate jumped by more than 1,000%. That's an increase from 3,105 to 36,359 lives lost. Since 1999, more than half a million people have died from overdoses involving opioids.
There is rising awareness of opioid use and in some states, Narcan vending machines dispense drugs to treat opioid overdose. The share of all facilities that offered medication-assisted treatment, such as drugs to curb withdrawal symptoms and drugs to block opioid-induced highs, increased from 9% in 2010 to 36% in 2020—indicative of the severity and prevalence of the country's drug epidemic. Private for-profit facilities increased from 30% to 41% in the same timeframe. It is estimated that treatment and rehabilitation centers were a $42 billion industry in the U.S in 2020 alone.
Keep reading to see how treatment rates for SUDs have changed in other states near you.
Iowa by the numbers
- Patients seeking treatment: 8,013 (-10.7% change since 2011)
--- Patients seeking treatment per 100k residents: 251.2 (-23.5% lower than national average)
- Patients under 18 seeking treatment: 438 (-46.0% change since 2011)
- Total facilities: 185 (+46.8% change since 2011)
Minnesota by the numbers
- Patients seeking treatment: 15,899 (-8.4% change since 2011)
--- Patients seeking treatment per 100k residents: 278.6 (-15.2% lower than national average)
- Patients under 18 seeking treatment: 338 (-62.1% change since 2011)
- Total facilities: 401 (+27.3% change since 2011)

subset: commoncrawl


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Morning Light by Abigail Reynolds
Artist Annie Wright likes her life free of complications, especially complications of the male persuasion. She has her dream job running a gallery in Woods Hole, her volunteer work rescuing abandoned dogs, her best friend Cassie Boulton Westing, and that's enough for her. She doesn't like to talk about her past, especially how she became a widow after just a few years of marriage. But one day her past walks right into the Cape Light Gallery in the form of her dead husband's best friend Jeremy, the man who left the country because it was too hard to see Annie married to someone else. If this weren't enough, Annie finds herself in charge of an abused and distrustful pile of fur called Bear, and is increasingly entangled in the complicated Westing family politics, while Cassie deals with some very unexpected developments.


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(For more information about Covid-19 and TAFE NSW studies, see Important Updates.)
"TAFE Radio is a station where students learn by doing," says Verity Chambers, TAFE NSW teacher of Media, Radio and Journalism. "We're proud to keep finding ways to keep doing just that."
And 'doing' is exactly what teachers and students have been up to. In a virtual social-distancing environment, everyone teamed up to create the first 'lock-down' TAFE Radio show. The whole 80-minute segment was based around pirating, pirate radio and, just for good measure and some fun, pirates in general! Head teacher Natalie Pozdeev is pictured - in pre-distancing times - with radio teacher and Pirate Show producer Brian Newington.
"I think the show really showed the strengths and weaknesses in broadcasting from home. But all together it worked out very well and I'm so excited to host next week's show!" – Lucas, radio student
"What was surprising was the breadth and depth of talent we have in our class and among our teachers who put it together so well while running this whole TAFE-radio-and-journalism-school, remotely. I loved being a very tiny part of a fun little radio show this morning!" – Dash, journalism student
"It's challenging to create a show from outside the studio with such large numbers of broadcasters, but with all the tools readily available, it was great to learn how studio-sounding and professional content can be produced no matter where you are." – Harrison, radio student
"It definitely left a warm feeling in me. In this case, my learning experience was quite large, as I managed to get on top of learning to be resourceful with next to no equipment, and also doing a solo piece was a first in this case for me." – Lucas, radio student
"If self-isolation has taught us anything, it is that if you work together for a common goal, things can be achieved no matter where you are." – Emily , radio student
"I think the strength of the show really came from the cohesive flow of everyone's segments and how they flowed into each other … And I have a little more of a critical view of my own vocal inflections and pacing which I hadn't considered so much in the past." – Tiffany, journalism student
Radio-related courses


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World News
To call Kashmir a territorial dispute is to dehumanize it: Ambassador Buch
New York. "It was an honor to have an hour-long meeting with Ambassador Yusuf Buch at his residence in New York City," said Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai, Secretary General, World Kashmir Awareness Forum. While paying homage to Ambassador Buch's life in exile, Fai said: "Ambassador Yusuf Buch born in Srinagar (Capitol City of Kashmir) was along with few other promising and brilliant youth exiled from the state in 1947 for his political beliefs. Mr. Buch was the Senior Advisor to the United Nations Secretary General for 20 years. His contribution to Kashmir cause has been legendary ever since Kashmir dispute was brought to the United Nations by India in 1948. Working in tandem with Kashmiri diaspora, Ambassador Buch had added vibrancy to the Kashmir cause. The nation of Kashmir salutes his commitment and dedication, and pay tribute to his inspirational spirit. Ambassador Buch is undoubtedly, a living encyclopedia on Kashmir."
Ambassador Buch told Dr. Fai that "It is of utmost importance to counter the impression that the Kashmir issue has somehow lost its urgency or shed its significance or is being addressed in some kind of a mythical peace process. The impression needs to be countered because it is false, because it ignores the agony of the people of Kashmir and because it thereby hardens the psychological underpinning of the current diplomatic inaction regarding the issue. We owe it to the tens of thousands whose blood has consecrated the cause of Kashmir's Azadi to try and disentangle it in whatever degree we can." Buch Sahib added "The attitude that needs to be fought in the context not only of Kashmir but of every major international problem is that of turning our backs to the Charter of the United Nations. The Charter is not scripture or a book of morals but, let us not forget, a multilateral treaty as binding on the largest or most powerful member state of the world organization as on the smallest or weakest. The sanity of international agreements must remain one of the bases of a sane and stable international order. The Kashmir issue involves that principle most pointedly."
When asked whether Kashmir was a territorial issue between India and Pakistan, Mr. Buch replied "Not much argument is called for to refute the proposition that Kashmir is just a territorial dispute between India and Pakistan. To call it a territorial dispute is simply to dehumanize it. And to go as far as saying that the dispute is not really about Kashmir amounts to saying in effect that Kashmiris are but a mythical people."
Buch Sahib responded when I asked: Why do the Kashmiris call for third party mediation? "The breaking of the impasse over Kashmir between India and Pakistan would be greatly facilitated by the presence of a mediator who would define the obligations of the parties under the agreements concluded between them, spell out the contentious issues and the conflicting positions and remove the confusion about what needs to be done to narrow the gap."
Ambassador Buch suggested: "The Governments of Pakistan and India have ample opportunities to articulate their positions and make them known to the world. Not so the people of Kashmir. I neither pretend impartiality nor claim a thorough knowledge of, or adherence to, the position of any particular section of Kashmiri opinion. But I think that an attempt to see the conflict from a Kashmiri – and human – perspective may not be useless in any mental exercise towards its resolution."
Dr. Fai can be reached at: 1-202-607-6435 or email@example.com
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed or referred to in this article do not necessarily represent those of WNTV or any of its staff or editors. WNTV's aim is to provide, so far as possible, a platform for external contributors with limited editorial intervention . Accordingly, readers are asked to note that the publication of articles on this site is not in itself to be taken as WNTV's endorsement of any reported third party position, policy or statement.


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Sports nutrition can be confusing, even for seasoned athletes. There are many products on the market that promise big results... but do they deliver?
Let's take a look at the role of protein in sports performance, and how to make healthy choices when shopping for protein bars.
Athletes Need Protein
Common sense tells us that athletes of all types--runners, swimmers, weight lifters--need protein to stay in top shape. What might be less intuitive is the role that protein plays in performance. Protein is necessary for building muscle mass, but just eating lots of protein won't give you well-defined abs. Muscle growth requires both diet and exercise.
A balanced diet is key when it comes to maintaining lean body mass. It's best to get an adequate amount of carbohydrates and fats so that your body can use the protein you consume to build and maintain muscles. Otherwise, protein ends up being used for energy production.
Athletes need more protein than less-active people, but their intake should increase moderately. Sedentary adults need about 0.8 - 1.0 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight; adults who exercise regularly need 1.1 - 1.5 grams per kilogram of weight; high-intensity athletes need 1.2 - 1.7 grams per kilogram of weight.
Spread Out Your Protein Intake
It's best to meet your protein goals throughout the day, rather than all in one meal. Front-loading protein at breakfast helps to stave off cravings and keep weight in check. Experts recommend aiming for 15 to 25 grams of protein at each meal and in the hour or so after working out (known as the recovery phase).
When considering how protein bars might fit into your sports nutrition plan, consider the whole picture. A nutrient-dense diet rich in fruit, vegetables, healthy fats, lean protein, and whole grains is the best foundation for peak performance.
Your body needs carbohydrates and a low to moderate amount of fat and protein before working out to give you energy. You could eat a meal several hours before a workout or eat a snack an hour or so beforehand. You will also want to eat a snack or meal containing protein and carbs after a workout to replace glycogen expended during exercise. Protein has a bigger role to play during recovery, as it provides amino acids that help repair and rebuild muscles.
Tips for Selecting Quality Protein Bars
It can be hard to know which protein bars to select. Here are some tips:
- Look for bars made with whole ingredients like fruit and nuts.
- Be mindful of calories, especially if you're watching your weight. Aim for fewer than 250 calories per bar.
- Protein bars should have protein! Look for bars with at least 5 grams. Aim higher if you're using them to replace a meal.
- Watch out for sneaky added sugars (anything ending in -"ose"), even if they're natural (agave, honey, raw sugar). Look for a bar that gets less than 35 percent of its calories from sugar. You can calculate the percentage by multiplying the grams of sugar by 4 and then dividing that number by the total calories.
- Be wary of sugar alcohols, which are sometimes used to sweeten and mask undesirable flavors without increasing carbs. Some people find that sugar alcohols cause gastrointestinal discomfort including bloating and gas.
- Fiber is important for managing weight. It also helps the energy in the bar last longer because it slows digestion. Bars with 3 to 5 grams of fiber are the way to go.
- Choose a bar with less than 5 grams of fat, if possible.


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The following is a re-post from the trade journal Meating Place.
USDA announced the agency has decided to withdraw the Organic Livestock and Poultry Practices (OLPP) final rule published on January 19, 2017. The withdrawal becomes effective May 13, 2018.
The rule would have increased federal regulation around animal housing, healthcare, transportation and slaughter practices of livestock and poultry for certified organic producers and handlers.
According to USDA, significant policy and legal issues were identified after the rule published in January 2017.
"After careful review and two rounds of public comment, USDA has determined that the rule exceeds the Department's statutory authority, and that the changes to the existing organic regulations could have a negative effect on voluntary participation in the National Organic Program, including real costs for producers and consumers," an agency news release stated.
"The existing robust organic livestock and poultry regulations are effective," said USDA Marketing and Regulatory Program Undersecretary Greg Ibach. "The organic industry's continued growth domestically and globally shows that consumers trust the current approach that balances consumer expectations and the needs of organic producers and handlers."
Among other things, the rules would have stopped organic poultry producers from using screened-in "porches" to house birds and required them instead to provide organic poultry with outdoor access.
Organic group pursues legal options
Last week, the Organic Trade Association requested that oral arguments be heard in the lawsuit it filed last September against USDA over its failure to put into effect the (now dismissed) new organic livestock standards. Before today's decision to withdraw the rule, USDA had delayed implementation multiple times since the January 2017 final rule.
Reacting to today's news, OTA Executive Director and CEO Laura Batcha said, "This most recent egregious attempt by the Department to ignore the will of the organic industry and consumers does not halt the Organic Trade Association's seeking judicial review, but in fact furthers our resolve.The Organic Trade Association will be immediately amend the complaint to yet again challenge USDA"s latest attempt to kill a rule that has been fully vetted over a decade."
Applegate, the nation's leading natural and organic prepared meat products company, had also supported the rules.
"Our company is harmed by competition from organic livestock products that are not meeting the highest organic welfare standards," said Gina Asoudegan, Applegate's vice president of mission and innovation strategy. "The absence of a consistent national standard for organic livestock products and its associated additional costs harm consumers in the form of higher prices."
The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, The Humane Society of the United States and The Animal Welfare Institute had also supported the now dismissed rules.
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Dr. Grumpy: "And when was that?"
Mrs. Senior: "I guess when I was younger."
A Blog detailing the insanity of my medical practice and the stupidity of everyday life.
I guess you know the exact diagnosis: a head thing.
Maybe the perfect treatment for her too? Some drug or other, or maybe something else.
Probably remembers how they started, not when they started...
Nope. I asked about that, too.
I think she is probably right. Mine started when I read her response.
I think I can understand why this one was a referral.
@Packer - Same here!! I know when mine started, when I was 17. My daughter's started at the same age (this year) however, like my mother's migraines, her migraines are linked to hormonal cycles and have decreased with a low-dose hormone prescription (immediately, yay!!). She also responds well to Imitrex as do I. Now if mine would just get better. meh. But my neurologist has moved to Vandy & I got to see her yesterday, YAY!!
Thanks, once again, for the giggle.
Mine started in my teens, but I didn't realize they were migraines because I thought that for a headache to be a migraine, the victim had to get nausea and vomiting. When I learnt that not all migraineurs get GI problems and that the hallmarks of a migraine are visual disturbances like haloes, shooting lights and photophobia, I realized that I was a migraineur.
Wow, how precise she is (not). LOL
Mine started when I was younger too but I know when. I was 24, before that I had tension headaches for as long as I can remember. At 24 the migraines hit.


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Area Plan Policy Review
The Mono County General Plan includes policies for each planning area, including Bridgeport. These policies serve to inform and refine General countywide policies as they relate to the Bridgeport Valley. The attached document is a working draft of proposed changes to those policies, discussed by the RPAC from Summer 2011 until present.


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Gold Just Became Money Again
On June 18, the Federal Reserve and FDIC circulated a letter to banks that proposes to harmonize US regulatory capital rules with Basel III.
BASEL III is an accord that tells a bank how much capital it must hold to safeguard its solvency and overall economic stability.
It's a global standard on bank capital adequacy, stress testing, and market liquidity risk.
Here's the important bit:
At the top of the proposed changes is the new list of "zero-percent risk weighted items," which now includes "gold bullion," right after "cash."
That's the part to take notice of.
If the proposals are approved by regulators — and that seems likely since adoption of Basel III will be — then this is a momentous change for the gold market.
Now banks will be allowed to hold bullion in their vaults and count it among their Tier 1 assets — in other words, the least risky assets.
That by itself would be bullish for the gold price, as banks that recognize gold's unique characteristics seek to stockpile more of it.
But that's not the whole story…
Gold Regains Money Status
For one thing, Basel III also stipulates that a bank's Tier 1 holdings must rise from 4% of assets to 6%.
That means that banks may not only replace a portion of their existing paper with bullion, but may use it to meet some of the extra 2% as well.
In addition, this vote of confidence from the highest monetary authorities gives further impetus to the remonetization of gold.
In essence, what's happening is that from now on gold will be considered "money" in virtually the same way as cash or bonds.
And banks will be given the choice between holding more of their core assets in history's most reliable store of value vs. paper backed by nothing more than the promises of increasingly wasteful governments.
Finally, there is the impact on individual and institutional investors.
Jeff Clark, in Casey Research's BIG GOLD newsletter, has been guiding gold investors for years. In his view, this news looks set to really shake up the gold market, because as regulators and banks increasingly view gold as having safety on a par with the various paper alternatives, it is logical that they will also see the need to beef up their own holdings.
There are a number of positives for gold going forward.
Though it remains speculation on our part, we believe that the net result of Basel III and associated adjustments to US regulations will be an increased recognition of gold's safe-haven status across all markets.
And that translates into higher global demand for the metal next year, and a concomitant increase in its price.
If you haven't done so already, it's time to get informed on gold and begin adding it to your portfolio.


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I'll never forget a student's response when I asked during a middle school social studies class what they knew about black history: "Martin Luther King freed the slaves."
Martin Luther King Jr. was born in 1929, more than six decades after the time of enslavement. To me, this comment underscored how closely Americans associate black history with slavery.
While shocked, I knew this mistaken belief reflected the lack of time, depth and breadth schools devote to black history. Most students get limited information and context about what African Americans have experienced since our ancestors arrived here four centuries ago. Without independent study, most adults aren't up to speed either.
For instance, what do you know about Reconstruction?
I'm excited about new resources for teaching children, and everyone else, more about the history of slavery through The New York Times' "1619 Project." But based on my experience teaching social studies and my current work preparing social studies educators, I also consider understanding what happened during the Reconstruction essential for exploring black power, resilience and excellence.
During that complex period after the Civil War, African Americans gained political power yet faced the backlash of white supremacy and racial violence. I share the concerns many writers, historians and other scholars are raising about the shortcomings of what schoolchildren traditionally learn
about Reconstruction in school. Here are some suggestions for educators and others interested in learning more about that time period.
Reconstruction amendments
As most students do learn, the U.S. gained three constitutional amendments that extended civil and political rights to newly freed African Americans following the Civil War.
The 13th, ratified in 1865, banned slavery and involuntary servitude except for the punishment of a crime.
The 14th, ratified three years later, granted citizenship and equal protection under the law to all people born in the United States, as well as naturalized citizens — including all previously enslaved individuals.
Then, the 15th Amendment asserted that neither the federal government nor state governments could deny voting rights to any male citizen.
The year 2020 marks the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the 15th Amendment on Feb. 3, 1870. The anniversary is a good opportunity to learn about how the amendment was supposed to guarantee that the right to vote could not be denied based on "race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
African American politicians
What few history and social studies classes explore is how these changes to the Constitution made it possible for African American men to use their newfound political power to gain representation.
Hiram Rhodes Revels, the first African American senator, represented Mississippi in 1870 after the state's Senate elected him. He was among the 16 black men from seven southern states who served in Congress during Reconstruction.
Revels and his colleagues were only part of the story. All told, about 2,000 African Americans held public office at some level of government during Reconstruction.
White supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan also formed following the Civil War. These terrorist groups engaged in violence and other racist tactics to intimidate African Americans, people of color, black voters and legislators. They thus made the accomplishments of African American politicians even more impressive as they served as public officials under the constant threat of racial violence.
Black activist women
African American women technically gained the right to vote in 1920, when the 19th Amendment passed. However, their constitutional right was limited in many states due to discriminatory laws.
Many black women were activists and women's suffrage movement leaders. Through public speaking, prolific writing and developing organizations dedicated to racial and and gender equality, they fought for equal rights and dignity for all.
Among the black women who were activists during Reconstruction were
the five Rollins sisters of South Carolina, who fought for female voting rights; Maria Stewart, an outspoken abolitionist before the Civil War and suffragist once it ended; and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, the first black woman in North America to edit and publish a newspaper, one of the first black female lawyers in the country and an advocate for granting women the right to vote.
Other women of color who played key roles in the suffrage movement included Ida B. Wells, the journalist and civil rights advocate who raised awareness of lynching, and Mary Church Terrell, founder of the National Association of Colored Women.
Higher education
Before the Civil War, many states made teaching enslaved individuals to read a crime. Education quickly became a top priority for black Americans once slavery ended.
While northern, largely white philanthropists and missionary groups and the U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, better known as the Freedmen's Bureau, did help create new educational opportunities, the African American public schools established after the Civil War ended were largely built and staffed by the black community.
Many new institutions of higher education, now called Historically Black Colleges and Universities or HBCUs, began to operate during Reconstruction.
These schools trained black people to become teachers and ministers, doctors and nurses. They also prepared African Americans for careers in industrial and agricultural fields.
Public and private HBCUs founded during Reconstruction and still operating today include Howard University in Washington, D.C., Hampton University in Virginia, Alabama State University, Morehouse College in Georgia and Morgan State University in Maryland. These colleges and universities train a disproportionate share of black doctors and other professionals even today.
Historical experiences
Storytelling, multimedia experiences and trips to historic sites and creative museums help get people of any age interested in learning about history.
Depending on where you live, you may want to embark on a family outing or school field trip.
The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia has a new permanent exhibit on the Civil War and Reconstruction.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in Washington, D.C. in 2017, contains artifacts from the Reconstruction era. It's also making the records of the Freedmen's Bureau, including the names of formerly enslaved individuals following the Civil War, available online.
Another option is the Reconstruction Era National Historic Park in Beaufort County, South Carolina.
I also recommend watching the PBS documentaries about Reconstruction by the scholar and filmmaker Henry Louis Gates Jr. and reading the young adult book Gates co-authored with children's nonfiction writer Tonya Bolden about the era. Gates has also compiled a Reconstruction reading list for adults.
In addition, the organization Teaching for Change curates a booklist on Reconstruction for middle and high school students. And the Zinn Education Project Teach Reconstruction Campaign offers a variety of resources including readings, primary sources and even lesson plans.
An incomplete transition
As the renowned black scholar W.E.B. DuBois observed, racist laws and violent tactics in many states actively limited black freedom.
"The slave went free; stood for a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery," he explained.
This was by no means voluntary. Intimidated and threatened by black enfranchisement and excellence in the era of Reconstruction, white supremacists attempted to enforce subordination through violence, such as lynching; and in systemic ways through Jim Crow laws. African Americans continued to assert their civil and constitutional rights as activists, politicians, business owners, teachers and farmers in the midst of white supremacist backlash.
With the latest voter suppression efforts restricting access to the ballot box for voters of color and the resurgence of racist violence and vitriol today, DuBois' words sound eerily familiar. At the same time it's reassuring to recall how quickly formerly enslaved African Americans made their way to schoolhouses and public offices.
Tiffany Mitchell Patterson, Assistant Professor of Secondary Social Studies, West Virginia University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.


text: Our project supports the re-use of natural stones, wood, and old equipment. Consequently, the aesthetic aspect of our architectural space is enhanced through the innovative usage of those ancient natural and man-made resources. This renewal process actually offers a wide variety of visually appealing designs such as the yokes, the oil jars and the modern display of archaeological collections. However, some ancient elements keep their original and historical functions in their contemporary usage. Actually, some of those elements are the rosettes, apertures, windows, arches, channels, and decorative elements. Those features definitely reflect the traditional and historical beauty that a space could acquire.


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(Here is the Director's Cut version of my column that will appear in Wednesday's print editions . . . )
Colin Kaepernick's sudden social activist stance has created ripples of reaction that will not abate. No ripple has been more fascinating and amusing to watch than this one:
The 49ers' backup quarterback has the NFL flummoxed and–if not frightened–at least profoundly anxious and more than a little nervous.
We know this for many reasons. But they can all probably be summed up in one sentence: President Barack Obama has commented personally and directly about Kaepernick's protest, while NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has not.
Yes, the NFL did issue a statement two weeks ago after Kaepernick's initial declaration that he would be sitting (and later kneeling) for pregame national anthems to protest recent police killings of African-American citizens.
The league's response was brief and pointed: "Players are encouraged but not required to stand during the playing of the National Anthem."
But again, that was from the NFL office. Goodell himself has remained quiet on the issue. President Obama, meanwhile, chose to answer a press conference question this week by saying he "didn't doubt" the "sincerity" of Kaepernick's stance and while not endorsing the anthem protest, added that maybe the quarterback's critics "will start seeing he has a point" about "certain concerns" that involve "justice and equality."
To review: The leader of the free world has seen fit to frame an individual opinion on Kaepernick and speak openly. But the leader of a mere sports league has not. Why?
One day Silent Roger may give us an answer. But I have my own theory. This thing is so far outside Goodell's comfort zone, he has no idea how to approach it – and is scared of saying any words that might upset (A) the league's sponsors or (B) the league's network broadcasting partners or (C) the league's players. Most likely, in that order.
(UPDATE: Goodell, some 12 hours after this blog post appeared, finally did make a few public comments about Kaepernick. The commissioner was kind of wishy-washy in his opinions. But at least he spoke on the topic. Obviously, I smoked him out.)
It was interesting, during my extended vacation after returning from the Rio Olympics, to watch the whole Kaepernick timeline evolve. First, the initial outrage with burned jerseys. Then, the well-it's-free-speech shrug. Then, support from teammate Eric Reid with the take-a-knee alternative. Then, the president's hot take. And now, we wake up Tuesday morning to find that Kaepernick's jersey is the top seller on NFL.com — maybe because all those who burned his jerseys are buying new ones.
Goodell must be going crazy because he can control nothing about the Kaepernick story. And the NFL is as controlling an organization as exists in sport. It might be as controlling an organization as exists in American commerce, period. This is a league that fines players for wearing socks improperly on game days.
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Now that the Supreme Court struck down a key section of the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, same-sex couples can apply for their foreign-born husbands, wives and fiancees to join them in the United States.
There are an estimated 28,000 gay and lesbian binational couples in the country, and for years many have been separated by immigration laws that didn't recognize their marriage.
I love my country and I love my state and I love the community ... so if there's a way to make this work that's going to be our first choice.
Brian Mathers and his husband, Isidro, have been together for 13 years, but they've been living in different countries for the past 15 months. Isidro went to visit his family in Mexico and couldn't return to the U.S.
The couple was living together in Sioux City, Iowa, when Isidro's visa expired. Because they're a gay couple, Mathers was unable to sponsor Isidro for a green card at the time. Without DOMA, none of this would have happened.
"We could have just gotten married then, it's legal in Iowa; it was then," Mathers says. "He never would have had to leave [and] we would have never had to go through this separation."
Isidro tried to stay in the country to be with Brian, but it became difficult to find work. He lost his job on the assembly line at a meatpacking plant.
"I was working in a car wash, cleaning houses [and] painting," Isidro says.
Because Isidro stayed in the country on an expired visa before he left, it will be more difficult for him to apply for permanent residency now, even though he and Brian married in Mexico City earlier this year. But Isidro says they'll keep trying.
"That's our goal ... to be together for the rest of our lives. It's hard to live apart," he says.
Mathers says the separation has been tough. Isidro's clothes are still in the drawers upstairs, and the garden he planted grows larger every year. Now, following the Supreme Court's DOMA decision, he's keeping his focus on their application for Isidro's permanent residency.
"We are going to be denied because it's an automatic denial for someone who overstayed their welcome," he says. "And then we'll have to file a waiver; it's a specific kind of waiver that is based on hardship to the American citizen spouse."
Des Moines immigration attorney Jim Benzoni has been working with Brian and Isidro for the past year. Benzoni told them their case was difficult, but not impossible.
"We're just going to sit down and require the same evidence we always require to get a case going," Benzoni says. "We'll have to go back and show a relationship before the marriage: letters, emails [and] living together."
The Department of Homeland Security issued a statement soon after the Supreme Court decision, saying that Immigration Services would now review visa petitions for same-sex spouses the same way it does for straight couples. Brian and Isidro say they just want resume their life.
"We kind of feel like there's been this interruption, but ... it's something we'll work through and we'll get to the place that we were," he says.
Brian says the ruling gives them hope, but they can still be denied. If that happens, one of their few remaining options would be to move a country like Canada, where they could be together.
"But I don't want to do that," he says. "I love my country and I love my state and I love the community and all that stuff, so if there's a way to make this work that's going to be our first choice."
Brian and Isidro hope to be reunited, somehow, by this time next year.
Copyright 2013 Iowa Public Radio