Prepare for Currency/Trade Wars; How Might China Respond to US Tariffs?
by ilene - September 27th, 2010 1:57 am
Prepare for Currency/Trade Wars; How Might China Respond to US Tariffs?
Courtesy of Mish
Patience of US legislators regarding the value of the Yuan has finally given out. Last Friday, Congress jumped into the fray after exceptionally harsh statements from Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who up until now had always preached diplomacy. Here is a brief sequence of events.
Patience Runs Out
MarketWatch reports Patience runs out on quiet diplomacy on China currency.
Sept. 15, 2010
Patience appears to have run out in Washington for the standard White House approach that favors quiet diplomacy for dealing with China over the dispute over the value of its currency.In testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee, a wide array of experts said that quiet diplomacy has essentially been a failure. The only debate at the hearing was what new approach should be tried.
Geithner Enters the Battle
One day later Geithner calls for faster yuan appreciation
Sept. 16, 2010
“China needs to allow significant, sustained appreciation over time to correct this undervaluation and allow the exchange rate to fully reflect market forces,” Geithner said in testimony prepared for the Senate Banking Committee. Geithner will also talk about the yuan with the House Ways and Means Committee this afternoon.“It is past time for China to move,” Geithner said.
An undervalued yuan has helped China to boost exports and encouraged U.S. companies to outsource manufacturing to China from the U.S., Geithner said. He added that the yuan is held at a undervalued level by “heavy intervention” even as Chinese officials have pledged to allow the yuan’s value to be guided more by market forces.
China Rebuffs Geithner
Responding to Geithner China says it won’t repeat Japan’s mistake
Sept. 20, 2010
China pledged not to repeat Japan’s mistake and allow its currency to rise in response to foreign pressure, countering criticism from U.S. lawmakers that the yuan is undervalued amid a growing cross-Pacific row over Beijing’s currency regime.“China will not go down the path that Japan did and give in to foreign pressure on the yuan’s exchange rate,” Li Daokui, an economist and member of the monetary policy committee of the People’s Bank of China, was cited as saying in a report by the state-run China Daily.
Li’s comments appeared to reference to the 1985 Plaza Accord that resulted in coordinated government
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The Marriage of Mercantilism and Corporatism: When Free Trade Is Not ‘Free’
by ilene - September 13th, 2010 10:45 pm
The Marriage of Mercantilism and Corporatism: When Free Trade Is Not ‘Free’
Courtesy of JESSE’S CAFÉ AMÉRICAIN
"The consequences of this policy are also stark and simple: in effect, China is taxing imports while subsidizing exports, feeding a huge trade surplus. You may see claims that China’s trade surplus has nothing to do with its currency policy; if so, that would be a first in world economic history. An undervalued currency always promotes trade surpluses, and China is no different." Paul Krugman
And he is exactly right. As regular readers know this matter of Chinese mercantilism and its toleration and acceptance by the West has been a key observation and objection here since 2000. Any economist who does not understand that devaluing and then maintaining an artificially low currency peg with a trading partner distorts the nature of that trade should review their knowledge of algebra.
And yet it was in 1994 during the Clinton Administration that China was permitted to obtain full trading partner "Most Favored Nation" status, while vaguely promising to float their recently devalued currency some day, and address the human rights issues that were endogenous to their non-democratic, totalitarian government.
"From 1981 to 1993 there were six major devaluations in China. Their amounts ranged from 9.6 percent to 44.9 percent, and the official exchange rate went from 2.8 yuan per U.S. dollar to 5.32 yuan per U.S. dollar. On January 1, 1994, China unified the two-tier exchange rates by devaluing the official rate to the prevailing swap rate of 8.7 yuan per U.S. dollar." Sonia Wong, China’s Export Growth
This served Mr. Clinton’s constituents in Bentonville quite well, and has some interesting implications for the Chinese campaign contributions scandals. It supported the Rubin doctrine of a ‘strong dollar’ while facilitating the financialization of the US economy and the continuing decline of the middle class wage earners, under pressue to surrender a standard of living achieved at great cost. "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Currency Collapse." and China’s Mercantilism: Selling Them the Rope
Not to limit this, George W. ratified the arrangement when he took office, and so it has gone on for almost fifteen years…
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Should China Dump Dollars for Commodities? What about the “Nuclear Option” of Dumping Treasuries? Can Global Trade Collapse?
by ilene - July 30th, 2010 5:59 pm
Should China Dump Dollars for Commodities? What about the "Nuclear Option" of Dumping Treasuries? Can Global Trade Collapse?
Courtesy of Mish
Every time there is a little blip by China in its purchasing or holding of US treasuries, hyperinflationists come out of the woodwork ranting about the "Nuclear Option" of China dumping treasuries en masse.
Such fears are extremely overblown for several reasons.
1. China’s purchasing of US assets is primarily a balance of trade issue. If the US runs a trade deficit, some other countries run a trade surplus and thus accumulate dollars. This is purely a mathematical function as I have pointed out many times.
2. If China dumps treasuries for Euro-based assets, oil-based assets, yen-based assets or for that matter anything other than dollar based assets, the problem merely shifts elsewhere and those buyers would have to do something with the dollars such as buying US treasuries or other US assets. This too is purely a mathematical function.
3. If China dumped treasuries it would tend the strengthen the RMB and China has been extremely reluctant to let the RMB appreciate. Indeed, the US is begging China to revalue the RMB upward, but China resists.
While China may make short-term moves in its reserve holdings, the odds of China dumping treasuries or dollars in size is quite remote.
Capital Tsunami Is The Bigger Threat
Michael Pettis discusses those ideas and more in The capital tsunami is a bigger threat than the nuclear option.
An awful lot of investors and policymakers are frightened by the thought of China’s so-called nuclear option. Beijing, according to this argument, can seriously disrupt the USG bond market by dumping Treasury bonds, and it may even do so, either in retaliation for US protectionist measures or in fear that US fiscal policies will undermine the value of their Treasury bond holdings. Policymakers and investors, in this view, need to be very prepared for just such an eventuality.
… the idea that Beijing can and might exercise the “nuclear option” is almost total nonsense.
In fact the real threat to the US economy is not the dumping of USG bonds. On the contrary, in the next two years the US markets are likely to be swamped by a tsunami of foreign capital, and this will have deleterious effects on the US trade deficit, debt levels, and employment.
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Oil, Not China, Is The Real Destroyer Of America’s Trade Balance
by ilene - April 11th, 2010 2:12 pm
Oil, Not China, Is The Real Destroyer Of America’s Trade Balance
Courtesy of Vincent Fernando at Clusterstock
UBS’s head of Asia-Pacific economics argues that the real global trade imbalance isn’t U.S.-China, it is U.S.-oil. As shown below, current account surpluses from fuel exporting-nations have been a far larger driver of total global trade imbalances coming from emerging markets.
China’s current account surplus (in blue) has been large in recent years, as a percentage of the global economy, but it has been dwarfed by fuel exporters (in green):
Jonathan Anderson of UBS, via Caixin:
Looking at the movements from the late 1990s through 2006, when the overall U.S. deficit worsened from 2 percent of GDP to nearly 7 percent of GDP at the trough, a full three percentage points of that adjustment came from other advanced economies and from fuel imports; only two percentage points came from China and other non-fuel emerging markets. And the recent drop in the U.S. deficit had almost nothing to do with China; again, it was oil prices and developed trade that explains the entire swing over the past 18 months.
Thus the U.S. could use a little less finger-pointing at China… and a lot less foreign oil usage… if it really wants to correct its global trade imbalance.
This is a huge argument against U.S. trade protectionism since protectionism would miss the largest cause of America’s trade deficit while only hurting U.S. export prospects by pissing off trade partners.
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Trade Tensions Are Brewing……..
by ilene - September 14th, 2009 2:09 pm
Trade Tensions Are Brewing……..
Courtesy of Jan-Martin Feddersen at Immobilienblasen
Juts what the doctor ordered…… As i´ve feared last week the "conditions" for world trade are not getting better…… Lets all hope that the tensions don´t escalate……. Just in China to request WTO consultations with US over tyre dispute – Commerce Ministry China says: – US tyre decision violates WTO rules. – Wants dialogue with US on tyre tariffs. Source: RTRS
The downward spiral in global trade volumes has abated, and the most recent month for which we have data (June) shows a modest uptick. Nonetheless, the collapse of global trade, even now, remains dramatic by the standards of the Great Depression.
China Probes ‘Unfair Trade’ in U.S. Chicken and Auto Products
Sept. 14 (Bloomberg) — China announced dumping and subsidy probes of chicken and auto products from the U.S., two days after President Barack Obama imposed tariffs on tires from the Asian nation.
Chinese industries complain that they’re being hurt by “unfair trade practices,” the nation’s Ministry of Commerce said on its Web site yesterday. The dumping investigation relates to poultry alone, a spokesman said in Beijing today. The ministry didn’t specify the value of imports of the products.
Rising protectionism may hamper world trade and undermine the global economy’s recovery from recession, the European Central Bank ( see end of the post for details )said last week.
The U.S. placed tariffs starting at 35 percent on $1.8 billion of tire imports from China, backing a United Steelworkers union complaint against the second-largest U.S. trading partner.
China Reacts Quickly and Badly to Tire Tariffs Naked Capitalism
It would be better if we were not proven correct on this one, but when the US imposed stiff tariffs on imported tires from China late on Friday, we noted, “This could get interesting in a bad way.” The Chinese responded quickly over the weekend to announce they were investigating US auto parts and chicken, which together account for roughly as much as the disputed tires ($1.2 billion versus $1.3 billion for tires).
But protectionism is driven by the desire to protect jobs. Unemployment has not peaked in the US, and some analysts suggest that China’s job
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW.