China will hit a “growth wall” within the next three years, according to NYU economist Nouriel Roubini. The country’s reliance on fueling GDP growth through exports is unsustainable. He argues that China needs to revalue its currency so as to allow a transition from export-led to domestic demand-led growth. “The real income of households is going to increase, and they’re going to consume more. You export less and you consume more.” Is he right? Though there are more ways than one to skin this cat – domestic reforms that would facilitate faster rising Chinese wages, as advocated by Stanford economist Ronald McKinnon, are one way to fuel greater household spending – the data do indicate that Roubini is correct. As this week’s Geo-Graphic shows, when the renminbi appreciated significantly between 2005 and 2008 Chinese export growth slowed and household spending growth rose. This trend reversed after the pace of appreciation subsequently fell dramatically. This suggests that the Chinese government’s most recent five year development plan, which states that the government “must persist in the strategy of expanding domestic demand and maintaining steady and relatively fast development,” should include currency revaluation as a component policy element. Read more »

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In the run-up to the June G20 summit in Toronto, China came under significant U.S. pressure to loosen its currency peg to the dollar. “The administration constructively set the G20 meeting as an important juncture for China to change its inflexible currency practices,” said Sander Levin, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee on June 16^th. “If China does not act and the administration does not respond thereafter, the Congress will act.” Then one week before the summit, China announced that it would relax the peg, and indeed the renminbi (RMB) began to rise. The political tension dissipated. Yet since July 2^nd, five days after the summit, the RMB has ceased rising. It would appear that the much lauded Chinese currency pledge was a pre-summit head fake. Read more »

In his recently published memoir, former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson claims that Russian officials approached the Chinese in the summer of 2008 suggesting that both countries sell large amounts of debt issued by U.S. Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs), such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, in order to pressure the United States into explicitly backing these companies. Paulson, who found the report “deeply troubling,” claims that China opted not to collaborate with Russia. Nonetheless, both countries dumped GSE debt that summer, as illustrated in the figure above. Russia sold $170 billion during 2008, while China sold nearly $50 billion between June 2008, when its holdings peaked, and the end of 2008. During this fire sale the yield spread between GSE debt and U.S. Treasury debt soared, as illustrated in the figure below. As GSE debt was widely used as collateral in the U.S. repo market, U.S. financial institutions were obliged to quickly pony up more securities to support their borrowing. This exacerbated the growing credit crunch. The U.S. government was forced to put the GSEs into conservatorship in September 2008. Secretary Paulson was more right than he realized to be concerned. The episode highlighted the clear risks to the United States, and indeed the wider world, of growing American dependence on foreign government lending. Read more »

Over the past decade, trade between the United States and China has grown dramatically while also becoming significantly more imbalanced. The United States ran a bilateral trade deficit with China of over $225 billion in 2009, compared with a $69 billion deficit in 1999. One factor contributing to this imbalance is U.S. export controls on certain high-tech products deemed important for national security. As illustrated in the chart above, the United States now exports to China relatively less machinery and relatively more crude materials, such as scrap metal, than it did a decade ago. China’s president Hu Jintao has urged the United States to relax technology export controls for years. The Obama administration is starting to push to do just that, in line with its goal of doubling exports in five years. U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has bluntly observed that “America’s decades-old, bureaucratically labyrinthine [export control] system does not serve our 21st-century security needs or our economic interest.” Read more »