Posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
By bsetser
Mike Dooley and Peter Garber argue (at VoxEU) that the recent crisis has nothing to do with “Bretton Woods 2” — an international monetary system where reserve growth in the “periphery” financed deficits in the center. They write:
“the crisis was caused by ineffective supervision and regulation of financial markets in the US and other industrial countries …. [NOT BY] ….”current account imbalances, particularly by net flows of savings from emerging markets to the US,” “easy monetary policy in the US” or “financial innovation. … the idea that fraud and reckless lending flourished because US financial markets were unable to honestly and efficiently intermediate a net flow of foreign savings equal to about 5% of GDP, while having no problem with intermediating much larger flows of domestic savings, is astonishing to us.” *
The authors of Box 1.4 of the IMF’s Spring 2009 World Economic Outlook also attribute the current crisis to risk management failures in large financial institutions and weaknesses in the regulation and supervision of such institutions.** The role of imbalances are downplayed, as a “disorderly exit from the dollar has not yet been part of the crisis narrative.”
The last point is hard to refute: the dollar rallied during the most intense phase of the crisis.*** Reserve growth stopped, but that was because private money moved out of the emerging world and into the dollar, yen and swiss franc after the crisis – not because the world’s central banks lost confidence in the dollar. The proximate cause of the most recent phase of the crisis was a collapse in private financial intermediation, not a collapse in key central banks’ willingness to finance US.
But the absence of the kind of dollar collapse that many postulated might bring Bretton Woods 2 to an end doesn’t imply – in my view – that there was no connection between a global system marked by large inflows from the emerging world and the current crisis. The key issue is whether or not the large net flow from the emerging world to the US and Europe created conditions that facilitated, directly or indirectly, the failure of private risk management.
Three potential connections come to mind:
A rise in offshore dollar deposits by central banks provided some of the financing for the growth in banks’ dollar balance sheets. Central bank inflows into offshore money market funds had a similar impact.
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Posted in Systemic Risk, U.S. trade deficit and external debt | 19 Comments »
Posted on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
By bsetser
If I had to pick a single graph to explain the evolution of the United States’ balance of payments – and thus, indirectly, the entire story of the world’s macroeconomic “imbalances” – this would be it.
All data is in dollar billions, and is presented as a rolling four quarter sum.*
The red line is the United States current account deficit.
The black line is the United States financing need – defined as the sum of the current account deficit plus US outward FDI and US purchases of foreign long-term securities.** The dip in the total US financing need from mid 2005 to mid 2006 isn’t real. It reflects the impact of the Homeland Investment Act, a holiday on the repatriation of the foreign profits of US multinationals that produced a sharp fall in outward FDI.*** The rise in the United States financing need over the course of 2007 by contrast is real; American investors bought the decoupling story and wanted to invest more abroad.
The shaded area represents official demand for US assets. The inflows from central banks that report data to the IMF and Norway are known. The inflows from central banks that don’t report and other sovereign funds are my own estimates. The key countries that do not report reserves are – in my judgment – China, Saudi Arabia and the other countries in the GCC. I have assumed that the dollar share of their reserves is closer to 70% than 60% (supporting evidence). I by contrast have assumed that the GCC’s sovereign funds have a diverse portfolio.
What does the graph tell us?
In my view, three things:
First, the rise in the US current account deficit from 2002 to 2006 is associated with a rise in official demand for US assets. The quarterly IMF data doesn’t extend back to the late 90s – or to the early 1980s. But trust me, that is a change from past periods when the US current account deficit expanded. To be sure, private investors abroad were also buying US assets. But the rise in the overall US financing need associated with the rise in the current account deficit wasn’t financed by a comparable rise in private demand for US assets.
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Posted in China, Sovereign Wealth Funds, U.S. trade deficit and external debt, central bank reserves | 28 Comments »
Posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
By bsetser
Few topics are quite as polarizing as the “savings glut.” The very term is often considered an attempt to shift responsibility for the current crisis away from the United States.
That is unfortunate. It is quite possible to believe that the buildup of vulnerabilities that led to the current crisis was a product both of a rise in savings in key emerging markets, a rise that — with more than a bit of help from emerging market governments — produced an unnatural uphill flow of capital from the emerging world to the advanced economies, and policy failures in the U.S. and Europe.
The savings glut argument was initially put forward to suggest that the United States’ external deficit was a natural response to a rise in savings in the emerging world – and thus to defuse concern about the sustainability of the United States’ large external deficit. But it was equally possible to conclude that the rise in savings in the emerging world reflected policy choices* in the emerging world that helped to maintain an uphill flow of capital – and thus that it wasn’t a natural result of fast growth in the emerging world. This, for example, is the perspective that Martin Wolf takes in his book Fixing Global Finance. Wolf consequently believed that borrowers and lenders alike needed to shift toward a more balanced system even before the current crisis.
From this point of view, the savings glut in the emerging world — as there never was much of a global glut, only a glut in some parts of the world — was in large part a result of product of policies that emerging market economies put in place when the global economy — clearly spurred by monetary and fiscal stimulus in the US — started to recover from the 2000-01 recession. China adopted policies that increased Chinese savings and restrained investment to try to keep the renminbi’s large real depreciation after 2002 – a depreciation that reflected the dollar’s depreciation – from leading to an unwanted rise in inflation. The governments of the oil-exporting economies opted to save most oil windfall – at least initially. Those policies intersected with distorted incentives in the US and European financial sector – the incentives that made private banks and shadow banks willing to take on the risk of lending to ever-more indebted households (a risk that most emerging market central banks didn’t want to take) to lay the foundation for trouble.
On one point, though, there really shouldn’t be much doubt: savings rates rose substantially in the emerging world from 2002 to 2007. Consider the following chart – which shows savings and investment in emerging Asia (developing Asia and the Asian NIEs) and the oil exporters (the Middle East and the Commonwealth of independent states) scaled to world GDP.
Investment in both regions was way up. But savings was up even more.
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Posted in China, Systemic Risk, U.S. trade deficit and external debt | 67 Comments »
Posted on Sunday, June 28th, 2009
By bsetser
On Friday I tried to show why the US net international investment position deteriorated in 2008 – and also why it didn’t deteriorate in the previous years. Even after the market and currency gains of the past evaporated in 2008, the US net debt isn’t quite as big as an analyst who looked at the United States large cumulative current account deficit would expect. Some of the debt that the US thinks it sells to the rest of the world every year seems to disappear when the US goes out and tries to count the total amount owes the world – and how much equity in US companies have been sold to foreign investors.*
Yet even if the US data doesn’t show quite as much debt as it probably should, it still tells a lot going about what was on in the US – and the global – economy in the run up to the crisis.
It is consequently tempting to try to do a bit of forensic accounting to help understand how vulnerabilities built up. One thing quickly becomes clear. The US was piling up external debts in the run-up to the crisis even if the United States’ net international investment position wasn’t deteriorating.
The data in the NIIP can be disaggregated into debt and equity fairly easily. It is also fairly easy to separate out net official and net private claims. There isn’t a separate breakout for “official” investments in equities – as central bank and sovereign funds’ equity investments are aggregated together with their investments in US corporate bonds. But the US survey data indicates that official holds of equities were over three times official holdings of corporate bonds in the middle of 2008, so I don’t feel too bad considering “other official assets” a proxy for central bank and sovereign funds’ investment in US equities.
But don’t get bogged down in the details. There is no doubt that the US was clearly racking up debts to both official and private creditors in the run up to the crisis. Net US external debt (US borrowing from the world, net of US lending to the world) is now close to 40% of US GDP — a fairly high level for a country with a modest export sector.
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Posted in U.S. trade deficit and external debt, central bank reserves | 27 Comments »
Posted on Friday, June 26th, 2009
By bsetser
For a long time, large US trade and current account deficits didn’t push up the total amount the United States owed to the world, at least not if the market value of US investment abroad was netted against the market value of foreign investment in the US. The net international investment position of the US stayed around negative $2 trillion even as the US chalked up $500 billion, $600 billion even $700 billion annual deficits, defying those who projected that rising deficits would put the US external debt on an unsustainable trajectory.
Why? The euros’ rise pushed up the value of US investments in Europe. The US external position actually benefits from a falling dollar, as most US liabilities are in dollars while many US assets are not. And foreign equities did better than US equities.
Those who argued that the US was attracting funds because it was the best place in the world to invest generally forgot to note that during the period when the US deficit was rising the US was consistently doing better on its investments abroad than foreigners were doing on their investment in the US.
That changed in 2008. The US borrowed $505 billion from the world.* The dollar’s rise reduced the value of US investment abroad by $685 billion ($583 billion without including direct investment). Foreign portfolio equity investments in the US fell in value by about $1.3 trillion. But US portfolio equity investments abroad fell in value by about $1.9 trillion. Add in changes in the value of US and foreign bonds and changes in market prices reduced the value of US portfolio investment abroad by $720 billion more than the changes in market prices reduced the value of foreign portfolio investment in the US. The size of that total losses rises if changes in the market value of US and foreign direct investment are also factored in. All told, changes in market prices (other than exchange rate changes) led to a $1.7 trillion deterioration in the United States net investment position.
Combine those valuation changes with ongoing US borrowing and the net international investment position deteriorated in a rather dramatic fashion. The US NIIP — the blue line in the following graph — deteriorated by $2.5 trillion if FDI is valued at market prices.
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Posted in U.S. trade deficit and external debt | 50 Comments »
Posted on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009
By bsetser
Central banks haven’t lost their appetite for Treasuries. At least not shorter-dated notes. John Jansen noted before yesterday’s 2-year auction “the central banks love that sector [of the curve].” And the auction result certainly didn’t give him cause to backtrack. Indirect bids — a proxy for central banks — snapped up close to 70% of the auction. Jansen again:
The Treasury sold $ 40 billion 2 year notes today and the bidding interest from central banks was frantic. The indirect category of bidding ( which the street holds is a proxy for central bank interest) took 68 percent of the total. That leaves about $ 13 billion for the rest of us.
Central banks also seem increasingly interested in five year notes. Indirect bids at today’s five year auction were quite high as well.*
Strong central bank demand for Treasuries shouldn’t be a real surprise. Reserve growth picked up in May: look at Korea, Taiwan, Russia and Hong Kong. There are even rumblings - based on the data that the PBoC puts out — that Chinese reserve growth picked up as well. The rise in reserve growth fits a long-standing pattern: emerging markets tend to add more to their reserves — and specifically their dollar reserves — when the euro is rising against the dollar. A fall in the dollar against the euro often indicates general pressure for the dollar to depreciate — pressure that some central banks resist (Supporting charts can be found at the end of a memo on the dollar that I wrote for the Council’s Center for Preventative Action).
And the Fed’s custodial holdings (securities that the New York Fed holds on behalf of foreign central banks) have been growing at a smart clip. Recent talk about a shift away from a dollar reserves by a few key countries actually coincided with a surge in the Fed’s custodial holdings. Over the last 13 weeks of data, central banks added $160 billion to their custodial accounts, with Treasuries accounting for all the increase.
$160 billion a quarter is $640 billion annualized — a pace that if sustained would be a record. Of course, $640 billion in central bank purchases of Treasuries would still fall well short of meeting the US Treasuries financing need. The math only works if Americans also buy a lot of Treasuries. That is a change.
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Posted in Fiscal Policy, central bank reserves, emerging economies | 42 Comments »
Posted on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009
By bsetser
Japan’s exports to China are still way down on a y/y basis in May, despite China’s stimulus.
Shipments to China, Japan’s biggest trading partner, fell 29.7 percent, more than April’s 25.9 percent. Exports to Asia slid 35.5 percent from 33.4 percent a month earlier.
hat tip, Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism.
That isn’t good news. US exports to China are also down (15.6% y/y, through in the first four months of 2009, though a bit less in April itself). The eurozone’s exports to China are also down — though the 8% or so fall y/y fall in the eurozone’s exports to China seems a bit more modest than the fall in Japan’s exports to China.
China’s economy may have expanded over the last year, but that expansion clearly hasn’t fed through into more Chinese demand for US, European or Japanese goods.
Not yet at least. Pick your explanation. China’s stimulus may have been directed at domestic producers. The process of substituting Chinese components for Japanese components in China’s exports may be accelerating. Or China’s recovery just may not be quite as robust as some believe.
The best that can be said of Japan’s May trade data is that Japan’s exports to China aren’t down as much as Japan’s exports to the US and Europe.
Shipments to the U.S. fell 45.4 percent in May after dropping 46.3 percent in April, the ministry said. Exports to Europe slid 45.4 percent from 45.3 percent.
The y/y comparison will get more favorable soon. But there is now real way to put all that positive gloss on Japan’s 41% year over year fall in exports. It is an epic fall.
Japan’s May 2009 exports were even a bit lower than its April 2009 exports. There may be some benign explanation for the slight dip in May, but I don’t think there is any way to suggest that the Japan’s May trade data suggests a robust global recovery.
Posted in 2009 slump, China | 42 Comments »
Posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009
By bsetser
Now that the markets have lost a bit of their froth, it seems fitting to note just how sharply trade — and private financial flows — have contracted over the past year. The US q1 balance of payments data is rather stunning.
Trade (as we all know) contracted far more rapidly during this cycle than in the past.
But the fall in private financial flows — outflows as well as inflows — has been even sharper than the fall in trade flows. US private investment in the rest of the world rebounded a bit in the first quarter, but private demand for US financial assets remained in the doldrums. Private investors were still pulling funds out of the US in the first quarter.
A close examination of the graph indicates that demand for US financial assets by private investors abroad actually peaked in the second quarter of 2007 — a peak that came after gross private flows (inflows as well as outflows) rose strongly in 2005 and 2006. That surge was — in my view — linked to the chain of risk associated with a world where central banks took the currency risk associated with financing the US external deficit and private intermediaries took the credit risk associated with financing ever more indebted US households.
Any interpretation of what caused the crisis has to explain this surge. But any interpretation of the crisis also needs to explain why US imports and exports continued to rise — and the US trade and current account deficit remained large — even after private inflows collapsed.
I suspect that part of the answer is that a lot of private inflows were linked to private outflows — as special investment vehicles operating in say the US could only buy long-term US mortgage bonds if someone in the US bought their short-term paper. The fact that private outflows collapsed along with private inflows meant that net private flows didn’t fall at the same rate. Indeed, at times - notably in q4 2008 — the fact that US investors pulled funds out of the rest of the world faster than foreign investors pulled funds out of the US provided the US with a significant amount of net financing.
And part of the answer is that private investors never were the only source of financing for the US current account deficit. Strong central bank demand — especially in late 2007 and early 2008 — offset a fall in private flows.
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Posted in 2009 slump, U.S. trade deficit and external debt | 20 Comments »
Posted on Sunday, June 21st, 2009
By bsetser
The good news in the latest World Bank China Quarterly:
One. China is growing, thanks to China’s government. The World Bank estimates that the government’s policy response will account for about 6 percentage points of China’s 7.2% forecast growth (p. 8). That’s good. There is a big difference between growing as 7% and growing at 1%. This was the right time for China’s government to “unchain” the state banks. Ok, it would have been better if China had allowed its currency to appreciate back in late 2003 and early 2004 to cool an overheated economy instead of imposing administrative curbs on bank credit and curbing domestic demand. Then China might not have ever developed such a huge current account surplus and avoided falling into a dollar trap. But better late than never: this was the right time to lift any policy restraints on domestic demand growth.
China has, in effect, adopted its own version of credit easing. It just works through the balance sheets of the state banks rather than through the balance sheet of the central bank. Andrew Batson:
By some indicators, credit in China is even looser than in the U.S., where the Federal Reserve has extended unprecedented support to private markets. … China’s methods for pumping cash into the economy are quite different from those of other major economies. Its banks, almost all of which are state-owned, made more than three times as many new loans in the first quarter as a year earlier. Central banks in the U.S., Europe and Japan lack such control over lending, and have instead used extremely low interest rates and direct purchases of securities to support credit.
Two. China’s fiscal deficit will be closer to 5 percent of GDP rather than 3 percent of GDP. That’s cause for celebration in my book. Last fall I was worried that the desire to limit the fiscal deficit to three percent of GDP would mean that there was less to China’s stimulus than met the eye (or hit the presses). I was wrong. If the likely future losses on the rapid expansion of bank credit are combined with the direct fiscal stimulus, China almost certainly produced a bigger stimulus program than any other major economy.
Three. China’s current account surplus is now projected to fall in 2009. Exports still haven’t picked up — and we now have data through the first five months of the year. Imports by contrast are starting to pick up. That shows up clearly in a chart of real imports and real exports, a chart that draws on data that that the World Bank’s Beijing office generously supplied me:
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Posted in 2009 slump, China | 61 Comments »
Posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009
By bsetser
The fall in China’s recorded Treasury holdings in April has attracted a fair amount of attention. Too much, in my view. Best that I can tell, China shifted from bills to short-dated notes in April rather than actually reducing its overall Treasury portfolio. It just so happens that China buys all its short-term bills in ways that show up in the US TIC data, but only a fraction of its longer-term notes in ways that show up in the US TIC data. A shift from bills to notes then could register in the US data as a fall in China’s total Treasury holdings and a rise in the UK’s holdings.
This is actually a well established pattern. The past five surveys of foreign portfolio investment in the US have all revised China’s long-term Treasury holdings up (in some cases quite significantly) even as they revised the UK’s holdings down. The following graph shows the gap between Chinese long-term Treasury purchases in the TIC data and China’s actual purchases of long-term Treasuries– as revealed in the survey. With the help of Arpana Pandey, I have smoothed out the impact of the survey revisions. But when there is a hard data point — say June 2006 — the y/y increase in China’s Treasury holdings in the adjusted series should match the increase in the survey.
The last survey data point though comes from June 2008, so the subsequently data includes some estimates — specifically estimates of the share of the UK’s Treasury purchases that should be attributed to China. I am pretty confident though that it is no more inaccurate than the published US TIC data, which systematically under counted Chinese purchases of long-term bonds over the last five years
Here are three signs to watch to know when China really is reducing its US holdings.
First, the TIC data should show a fall in China’s holdings, i.e. net sales of Treasuries.
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Posted in China, central bank reserves | 36 Comments »
