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VIDEOChina: A Good Thing Taken Too Far
Its long-term future may be bright, but in the short run we've got a bubble.
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To understand what's taking place in China today, we need to rewind the clock about a decade. At that time the Chinese government chose a policy of growth at any cost. To achieve that, it kept its currency (the renminbi) at artificially low levels against the dollar -- this helped already cheap Chinese-made goods become even cheaper than its competitors’. The US and global consumers were eager to buy them. China turned into a significant exporter to the US. Normally, if free-market economic forces were at work, the renminbi would have appreciated and the US dollar would have declined. However, if China let its currency appreciate, its exports would have become more expensive and the demand for Chinese products would have declined, and its economy wouldn't have grown at 10% a year.
But China isn't your local democracy, and it needed to grow at any cost. So instead, through the government-controlled banking system, China accumulated a couple trillion dollars of foreign reserves in US dollars and euros. This had an unintended consequence: It helped keep US interest rates at very low levels, and lent a friendly hand in the financing of a huge consumption binge by the US consumer (i.e., China’s largest customer).
The more China sold to the US, the more dollars it accumulated, and thus the more US Treasuries it bought, driving our interest rates down. The US consumer was in turn happy to leverage its future (through the “always” appreciating asset, its house) and delighted to consume cheap Chinese-made goods. (I'm not dismissing the role in what took place of many other factors, like lack of financial regulation; missteps by rating agencies, the Fed, and politicians; securitization; etc., but I don’t want to steal the spotlight from China).
This symbiotic match made in heaven between China and the US consumer worked great as long as housing prices kept rising and the financial machine kept multiplying dollars. But all good things come to an end, and great things come to an end with a bang. The financial meltdown erupted upon us, the US and global banks started dropping like flies … well, you know how that story played out. So now let’s fast forward a year. Today the global economy is stabilizing, thanks to Uncle Sam and various other “uncles” around the world. But the consumers of Chinese-made goods are overleveraged and now deleveraging, unemployment is high, the banks have got religion and aren't lending, and there's not much demand for loans anyway (except from the US government).
Despite this, the Chinese export-based economy, a manufacturer to the world, has clocked growth of 8.7% in 2009. The rest of the world looks at the Chinese growth miracle with envy; it seems that China has got economics figured out. But don’t hurry to trade your democracy for an authoritarian system. The Chinese grass is not as green as it appears.
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