China Needs to Look Within for Solutions to the Falling Dollar 14 comments
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As the dollar falls against the euro, yen and other major currencies, China and other emerging economic powers holding lots of dollars and U.S. securities are crying foul, and for an end to the dollar’s central status in global commerce.
If they are truly disgusted, they should look to themselves for answers.
Since the end of World War II, the dollar has largely replaced gold as the reserve asset central banks hold to back up national currencies. The supply of mineable gold is too limited, and efforts to back up currency with gold would result in chronic shortages of liquidity and global deflation.
When a merchant moves goods, for example, from Thailand to Mexico, the market for pesos into bahts is thin or nonexistent, and the merchant sells pesos for dollars to buy bahts. Similarly, many other cross-boarder trades, financial contracts and debts are denominated in dollars, although the euro is coming into greater use.
Over the years, governments and traders gravitated to the dollar, because the United States has the largest and most diversified economy. Virtually anything made or grown around the world is made or traded in the United States, and money invested in dollars is secure from political upheaval and state confiscation.
Until recently, the dollar has been a well managed currency. The U.S. government resisted the temptation to borrow too much and flood the world with too many dollars and Treasury securities, which provide liquidity the same as do dollars.
The current market determined system of exchange rates emerged by default in the early 1970s, when the Bretton Woods system of government-enforced fixed exchange rates failed, and the United States ended the convertibility of the dollar into gold.
This system has no rules or effective governing structure. Consequently, some governments seized opportunities to manipulate the system to gain competitive advantages in trade. For example, since 1995 China has maintained an undervalued currency by selling huge amounts of yuan for dollars to merchants and currency traders.
The undervalued yuan makes Chinese exports artificially cheap and foreign products too expensive in Chinese markets. China enjoys huge trade surpluses that create millions of jobs and double-digit growth in China. Japan and others have pursued similar strategies.
These policies impose huge trade deficits and unemployment on the United States, create enormous imbalances in the global economy, and contribute importantly to the Great Recession.
The U.S. trade deficit grew from about one percent of GDP in 2001 to more than five percent from 2005 to 2008, and this should have created a shortage of demand for U.S. goods and services and a recession.
However, China invested the dollars obtained suppressing the value of the yuan to purchase U.S. securities. U.S. consumers borrowed those dollars, against their homes and on credit cards, and kept the U.S. economy going.
Finally, the credit bubble burst and an even bigger recession resulted. Huge federal borrowing is now required to finance massive U.S. stimulus spending, bailout banks and otherwise rescue the U.S. economy.
All this borrowing floods capital markets with Treasury securities, which provide the same liquidity as dollars, and pushes down exchange rates for the dollar against every major currency except the Chinese yuan. This reduces the value of the dollars, as expressed in euro and yen, held by China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and others.
Hoisted on the consequences of their own mercantilism, China and others would like to see the dollar replaced by a basket of currencies.
A global currency poses enormous diplomatic and technical challenges, including creating an international body to control its supply and persuading governments to issue debt denominated in this global currency. Without those, private merchants and financiers would still seek a central national currency to facilitate trade and denominate private cross-border contracts and debts.
Even with a global currency, China could still buy dollars with yuan to keep its value suppressed against the dollar and boost exports into the United States. The United States would still have to run large federal deficits to avoid economic meltdown.
China would still be stuck holding dollars that chronically fall in value against other currencies.
If China and others want that problem fixed, they need to abandon currency manipulation and let their populations purchase more U.S. goods and services.
The U.S. economy would grow robustly, federal borrowing would subside and the threat of too many dollars compromising the dollar’s role in international finance would vanish.
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This article has 14 comments:
And I can think of 11 trillion reasons, one for every dollar of US government debt, why that dollar decline is certain.
Now since Adam Smith, Western countries, and especially the United States and Great Britain, have recognized mercantilism to have a midas allure: You get to pile up gold, but what do you eat? The Chinese get to pile up green pieces of paper while the Americans, ridiculed for eating too much, sit in their living rooms watching flat-screen TV's. It seems like a reasonable trade-off for the Americans.
Why would the Chinese do such things? The key to understanding this perverse behaviour is to see that there is no "China" in any real sense except as an aggregation that can be used for academic discussion. "China" is a big place with a lot of people all pursuing their own happiness as they see fit. Some of them live in huts raising pigs and they dream of a small apartment in Guangzhou. Others are in charge of "sovereign wealth funds" and dream of conquering Taiwan.
The next time you read the phrase "sovereign wealth fund," read: "crony slush fund." It puts some of the transactions in perspective. The apparent desire of the Chinese pig farmer to "consume" U.S. paper and send manufactured goods to American pig farmers is illusory. It's really a desire of well-connected communist officials to get rich at the expense of others just as it was the desire of the English King to amass gold at the expense of his serfs.
One day the serfs say "what's in this for me?" and they read a copy of the Wealth of Nations and say "is the new mercantilism working for me?"
Keep going Professor Morici.
- a job
- earnings to spend and save
- the benefits of govt spending e.g. roads and electricity
- citizenship of a country that is getting richer and stronger, not poorer and weaker
This is the reverse of the American experience.
China and the Chinese system have a lot of faults, but it is they that gain from mercantilism, not us.
On Oct 09 09:17 AM Tony Petroski wrote:
> A good article by Professor Morici outlining the reasons for the
> trade imbalance with China, Japan, and others. He even has the guts
> to call it what it is: mercantilism.
>
> Now since Adam Smith, Western countries, and especially the United
> States and Great Britain, have recognized mercantilism to have a
> midas allure ...etc.
Before we see some change howl how will the dollar go and how will the printing excesses get mopped up? Truly, as the Chinese say, we do live in interesting times.
Here are some references from 2003-2004
news.google.ca/archive...
eg.
"The assumption that the trade deficit also costs the United States jobs is what alarms economists like Peter Morici, a business school professor at the University of Maryland.
Morici estimates that the persistent trade deficit has cost the nation upwards of 1.3 million jobs at a time when the Labor Department says 8.2 million are looking for work.
"We have a consumer economy, and when imports satisfy consumer demand, that puts limits on domestic growth,'' Morici said. "This is the primary reason we have an economic recovery which has, until very recently, produced meager job growth.''
On Oct 09 10:17 AM coreopsis wrote:
> Interested in links to the 'professor's' articles predicting the
> current economic crisis...or perhaps he is simply another academic
> that claims knowledge about a class of problems that only manifests
> itself ex post facto. As Nassim Taleb says, history doesn't run in
> reverse, and the fallacy of belief in the academic community is indeed
> a key reason why the Black Swan was not identified.
On Oct 09 09:17 AM Tony Petroski wrote:
> A good article by Professor Morici outlining the reasons for the
> trade imbalance with China, Japan, and others. He even has the guts
> to call it what it is: mercantilism.
>
> Now since Adam Smith, Western countries, and especially the United
> States and Great Britain, have recognized mercantilism to have a
> midas allure: You get to pile up gold, but what do you eat? The
> Chinese get to pile up green pieces of paper while the Americans,
> ridiculed for eating too much, sit in their living rooms watching
> flat-screen TV's. It seems like a reasonable trade-off for the Americans.
>
>
> Why would the Chinese do such things? The key to understanding this
> perverse behaviour is to see that there is no "China" in any real
> sense except as an aggregation that can be used for academic discussion.
> "China" is a big place with a lot of people all pursuing their own
> happiness as they see fit. Some of them live in huts raising pigs
> and they dream of a small apartment in Guangzhou. Others are in
> charge of "sovereign wealth funds" and dream of conquering Taiwan.
>
>
> The next time you read the phrase "sovereign wealth fund," read:
> "crony slush fund." It puts some of the transactions in perspective.
> The apparent desire of the Chinese pig farmer to "consume" U.S. paper
> and send manufactured goods to American pig farmers is illusory.
> It's really a desire of well-connected communist officials to get
> rich at the expense of others just as it was the desire of the English
> King to amass gold at the expense of his serfs.
>
> One day the serfs say "what's in this for me?" and they read a copy
> of the Wealth of Nations and say "is the new mercantilism working
> for me?"
>
> Keep going Professor Morici.
To the author: dang, are you Dan Reeve's long lost twin brother or what? here is a link if you don't know who I'm talking about: assets.sbnation.com/as...
On Oct 09 03:10 PM Dave Wrixon wrote:
> Actually, it is a complete load of old tosh, but it must be very
> reassuring for Americans to have the satisfaction of blaming their
> problems on others.
As long as too many Americans like Professor Morici believe that America is ALWAYS right and foreign nations, like 'evil' China, are ALWAYS wrong, this nation will continue down its path toward oblivion.