Courtesy of Mish.
Once again we are seeing articles and research papers stating the Chinese renminbi (yuan) is about to replace the dollar as the global reserve currency.
Here is a working paper by Arvind Subramanian and Martin Kessler at the Peterson Institute of International Economics stating The Renminbi Bloc is Here: Asia Down, Rest of the World to Go?.
A country’s rise to economic dominance tends to be accompanied by its currency becoming a reference point, with other currencies tracking it implicitly or xplicitly. For a sample comprising emerging market economies, we show that in the last two years, the renminbi (RMB) has increasingly become a reference currency which we define as one which exhibits a high degree of co-movement (CMC) with other currencies. In East Asia, there is already a RMB bloc, because the RMB has become the dominant reference currency, eclipsing the dollar, which is a historic development.
The same authors present a case in the Financial Times article China’s currency rises in the US backyard.
East Asia is now a renminbi bloc because the currencies of seven out of 10 countries in the region – including South Korea, Indonesia, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand – track the renminbi more closely than the US dollar. For example, since the middle of 2010, the Korean won and the renminbi have appreciated by similar amounts against the dollar. Only three economies in the group – Hong Kong, Vietnam and Mongolia – still have currencies following the dollar more closely than the renminbi.
This shift stems from China’s rise as a trader; its share of east Asian countries’ manufacturing trade has risen from 2 per cent in 1991 to about 22 per cent today. Countries that sell to the growing Chinese market or are locked in supply chains centred on China see the advantages of maintaining a stable exchange rate against the renminbi.
This development has two implications. First, it is one more important marker in the shift of economic dominance away from the US and towards China. Not only is China, by some measures, the world’s largest economy in purchasing power parity terms, the world’s largest exporter and the world’s largest net creditor (for more than a decade), but the renminbi bloc has now displaced the dollar bloc in Asia. The symbolism and its historic significance cannot be understated because east Asia, despite physical distance, has always been part of the dollar backyard.
Déjà Vu Rehash
The analysis by Subramanian and Martin Kessler is nothing but a Déjà Vu rehash of easily rebutted arguments that crop up time and time again.
Three Essential Facts
- China’s bond markets are not big enough or deep enough for the Yuan to displace the US dollar.
- Contrary to what most think, having the reserve currency is a a curse more than a blessing.
- Neither China nor the US wants to be the global reserve currency.
The first point alone seals the fate in my opinion but let’s take a closer look at the “curse of the reserve currency”.
Via email, Michael Pettis at China Financial Markets responds to points two and three. …
I think there is a lot less to all this than meets the eye. I have many times expressed my deepest skepticism about much of what is said about reserve currency status, and especially about most of the arguments based on the claim that “history proves…” History almost never proves the many statements made about reserve currency status, especially when the history of shifts from one dominant reserve currency to another consists of a single case, the shift in the 1920s to 1940s from pound sterling to the US dollar.
But history aside, there is a much more important objection to the idea that the RMB is likely to become a dominant reserve currency. Reserve currency status involves substantial costs to the issuing country. In fact – and I will discuss this extensively in my upcoming book due February next year (Princeton University Press) – I do not think that the role of the dollar provides for the US any “exorbitant privilege”, contrary to what many suppose. Rather, I have argued, it creates an exorbitant burden for the US economy, one that forces the US to choose between higher debt and higher unemployment whenever a country takes steps to force up its savings rate or, which is pretty much the same thing, to force up its current account surplus
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