China supports Euro, Offers to buy Greek debts

China's premier, Wen Jiabao, pledges support for euro

The country vows it will not reduce its holdings of European government bonds, and will double trade with Greece

• Reuters
• The Guardian, Monday 4 October 2010
• Article history

 

Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao, addresses the Greek parliament in Athens yesterday. Photograph: Petros Giannakouris/AP 

China pledged to support a stable euro and not reduce its holdings of European government bonds, in an effort to deflect criticism of its foreign exchange policy ahead of this week's EU-China summit.

Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, who is at loggerheads with the United States over the yuan and likely to face similar complaints during his tour of European countries emphasised China's willingness to cooperate with the EU.

"I have made clear that China supports a stable euro," he said during a visit to Greece at the start of a one-week European tour. "We will not reduce the holdings of European bonds in our foreign exchange portfolio."

Wen, who offered on Saturday to buy an unspecified amount of Greek government bonds when debt-laden Athens resumes issuing, said he was glad Greece was starting to emerge from the shadows of its debt crisis. Wen vowed to double trade with Greece to $8bn (£5bn) within five years and provide a $5bn credit line to Greek shipowners buying Chinese-built vessels.

China has said it needs to diversify its foreign currency holdings and has bought Spanish government bonds. Chinese state entities have been conservative about investing in foreign financial markets and the Chinese government faces domestic criticism over losses incurred from the global financial crisis.

At the height of the European debt crisis this year, Chinese officials, concerned that the crisis could hurt the global economy, pressed European officials to restore confidence in the euro. But Beijing has rejected discussion of its foreign exchange policy. It even blocked an attempt by G20 leaders in June to praise its decision to allow greater flexibility in the yuan's exchange rate.

Ahead of a China-EU summit on 6 October, Wen urged the bloc to recognise China as a market economy, making it less vulnerable to anti-dumping charges under WTO rules. In exchange, China offered to boost copyright protection and widen bilateral trade.

"China commits to improving the investment environment, to intensify copyright protection, widen bilateral trade and upgrade technology cooperation," he said in his speech in Greece's parliament through an interpreter.

But despite its growth, China remains an emerging economy, Wen said. "The basic reality of China, such as a huge population, a weak economic base, and unbalanced growth has not radically changed," Wen told parliament.

"Per capita GDP is just one eighth of Greece's and the percentage of population below the poverty line is three times that of Greece. China continues to be an emerging country."

Wen and his Greek counterpart George Papandreou said in a joint statement the world's nations need to coordinate economic policies for global recovery to find a sure footing. "Global economic recovery is a journey with many turns and a full exit from it requires joint efforts," Wen said yesterday. He made no comments on the yuan. On Saturday he said he was willing to work with the EU to confront the financial crisis and reform the international financial system.

He said he was confident Greece was on track to exit a debt crisis that shook the euro and said China wanted to boost cooperation with Greece, which faces its worst recession in decades.

"Greece is China's best friend in the EU," Wen said at a meeting with Greek opposition leader Antonis Samaras. Bilateral trade volume should double to $8 billion euros a year in 2015 with Greek traditional exports, such as olive oil, increasing.

"A few months ago, [we] signed an agreement to purchase 290 tonnes of Greek olive oil," Wen said. "Last night, for the first time in my life, I dipped a bite of bread in olive oil. It tasted very good."

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China offers to buy Greek debt

Prime minister Wen Jiabao says his country will support Greece and rest of euro zone to overcome financial crisis. Last Modified: 03 Oct 2010 16:23 GMT http://www.youtube.com/v/ZN7DFPVz0qw Gerald Tan reports on the significance of China's proposal to buyout Greece's debt

China has offered to buy Greek government bonds, in a show of support for the country whose debt burden pushed the euro zone into a crisis. Wen Jiabao, the Chinese prime minister, made the offer on Saturday at the start of a two-day visit to Greece, his first stop in a European tour. During talks with George Papandreou, the Greek prime minister, Wen said China would double its trade ties with Greece over the next five years, underscoring Beijing's use of economic strength to win friends. "China will undertake a great effort to support euro zone countries and Greece to overcome the crisis," Wen said. In addition to seeing economic opportunities in Greece, China's support of a struggling European country may also help deflect international criticism of its trade policies and its refusal to let its yuan currency appreciate sharply. 'Full market status' Wen said during the visit that China will address European concerns over its investment rules and copyright violations, but wants the EU to relax remaining trade barriers with Beijing in return. Speaking at Greece's parliament, he urged the EU to recognise China's "full market economy status" and relax restrictions on high-tech exports. "I have repeatedly said that China supports a strong euro and will not reduce the number of European bond holdings from its foreign exchange reserves," he said. Wen sought to ease European concern that overseas companies operating in China face licensing rule restraints that give local competitors an unfair advantage. He said China would "strengthen dialogue" with the EU and was committed to continue "improving investment, confronting issues of intellectual copyright protection, expanding bilateral commerce and upgrading cooperation in technology." Wen did not specify how much Greek debt China would be willing to buy or which Chinese entities would buy the bonds. Chinese state entities have been generally conservative about investing in foreign financial markets and the Chinese government faces domestic political criticism over losses incurred by these entities during the global financial crisis. China has a lot to gain from getting a foothold into Europe, Vagelis Agapitos, an economist in Athens specialising in investment, said. "They [China] get a bargain in terms of buying into strategic industries, such as the port authorities, the railways and the logistic centre, which is important for the export of Chinese goods," Agapitos told Al Jazeera. High borrowing cost A senior Greek government official said Wen made clear his offer concerned buying bonds only when the country returned to markets. Greece, which is currently funded through a 110 billion euro ($150 billion) EU/IMF bailout, is only issuing short-term treasury bills for the time being. Since the true scale of its debt burden emerged late last year, investors have shunned its bonds. The yield they demand to hold 10-year Greek debt has shot up to 10 per cent, compared with just 2.3 per cent for similar bonds from the euro zone's biggest economy Germany, making it too expensive for Greece to seek long-term funding in international markets. It has said it wants to return to markets some time next year to sell longer-term debt. "There is domestic pressure [in Greece] not to sell itself cheaply, but there is also quite significant international pressure regarding the total debt, which is at 120 per cent of the GDP, and rising," Agapitos said. "This needs to go down in order to avoid debt restructuring which would be disastrous, not only for Greece but also for the European Union as a whole," he said. China, at loggerheads with the US over the yuan and likely to face similar complaints during this European tour, emphasised its willingness to co-operate with the 27-nation EU on financial issues. "China is prepared, hand in hand with the EU, as passengers in the same boat, to strengthen co-operation ... to confront the financial crisis," Wen said. "I believe that we can undertake a genuine effort to promote the reform of the international financial system and strengthen its supervision," he said.

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China Bashers Pass Buck on What’s Ailing U.S.

By Kevin Hassett

'Blaming China is fun for the political and intellectual elites because it allows them to ignore their own failures'

 

Oct. 4 (Bloomberg) -- China bashing is all the rage in Washington, as politicians of both parties blame the world’s fastest-growing major economy for high jobless rates in the U.S.

Such a popular target is China that the U.S. House of Representatives, all but paralyzed by the prospect of next month’s election, easily passed a bill last week that might impose tariffs on China in retaliation for currency manipulation.

Blaming China is fun for the political and intellectual elites because it allows them to ignore their own failures. Gridlocked politicians on both sides of the aisle are equally attracted to the claim. The problem with U.S. growth isn’t that we have an out-of-control government and the second-highest corporate tax rates on earth; it’s all China’s fault.

As political scapegoating goes, this is easy -- too easy. In truth, the impact on the U.S. economy of a change in Chinese currency policy could well be so small that it would be almost impossible to detect.

First consider the arguments of those who say the U.S. would see significant benefits from a more freely floating yuan.

C. Fred Bergsten of the Peterson Institute for International Economics testified in the House last month that “elimination of the Chinese misalignment would create about half a million U.S. jobs, mainly in manufacturing and with above-average wages, over the next couple of years.”

Toward Equilibrium

How to accomplish that? Bergsten estimates that an appreciation of about 25 percent against the dollar would be necessary to restore an equilibrium exchange rate. When he testified on Sept. 15, the yuan had risen at an annualized rate of only about 4 percent since June, when the Chinese government pledged more flexibility. The growth rate does seem to have increased since Sept. 15.

Bergsten recommends that the U.S. designate China as a “currency manipulator” and encourage other nations to apply pressure on China to change its policy. He also says the U.S. should engage in “countervailing currency intervention,” which means purchasing yuan to offset China’s dollar purchases.

There is a good deal of academic disagreement over the Bergsten analysis. Helmut Reisen, head of research at the OECD Development Center, part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, wrote in April that “it is far from assured” that an appreciation of the yuan would influence current account balances.

He added, “There is a clear political focus on the bilateral U.S.-Chinese trade balance, but bilateral imbalances are of no economic interest -- there are more than two countries in the world.”

Ripple Effects

Philip Levy, my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, shares this view. The ripple effects throughout the trading world of a more flexible yuan could be enormous, diluting the specific impact on any one country, even if that country is the U.S.

If we buy fewer imports from China, we might just buy more from some other country. A sign that this effect might be important, Levy argues, is that even while Chinese imports into the U.S. have been surging, total Asian imports have been roughly constant. This suggests that at least part of the impact of a change in Chinese currency policy would be a tweak in U.S. trade with Malaysia or Japan.

Economist Ray Fair of Yale University attempted to account for ripple effects in a paper that analyzed the macroeconomic impact of Chinese revaluation.

“The estimated effects on U.S. output and employment are modest,” he wrote. “Positive effects on U.S. output from a decrease in imports from China are offset by negative effects on U.S. output from increased inflation and from a decrease in U.S. exports to China because of a Chinese contraction.”

History as Guide

History also is a guide. If changes in the exchange rate are truly a big deal, then the U.S. trade deficit with China should have decreased during the Chinese currency appreciation from 2005 to 2008. Instead, it grew.

Then there’s the question of scale.

Assume that starting in August 2008, when China’s last revaluation ended, U.S. imports from China started tracking those of Japan, another big Asian trading partner of the U.S. that does let its currency float. Under that scenario, imports from China this year would have been about $27 billion lower. In a $14 trillion economy, that is hardly enough to have much of an impact on jobs, especially if imports from other countries increase.

Economic policies with uncertain benefits can be defensible if they carry no cost. Bashing China has real costs: It might cause a trade war reminiscent of the one that put the world economy into a death spiral in the 1930s. And it definitely distracts attention from the need for government policies that directly help the U.S. economy and those looking for jobs.

So isn’t it time we left China alone?

(Kevin Hassett, director of economic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, is a Bloomberg News columnist. He was an adviser to Republican Senator John McCain in the 2008 presidential election. The opinions expressed are his own.)

--Editors: Laurence Arnold, James Greiff
Click on “Send Comment” in the sidebar display to send a letter to the editor.
To contact the writer of this column: Kevin Hassett at khassett@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this column: James Greiff at jgreiff@bloomberg.net

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Economics is a religion, not a science

THINK ASIAN
By ANDREW SHENG

‘Within the cathedral of mainstream economics, there are many chapels devoted to specialised problems’

IS economics a religion? Paul Krugman argued recently in his Aug 21, New York Times column that the policy elite of central bankers, finance ministers and politicians are “acting like priests of an ancient cult, demanding that we engage in human sacrifices to appease the anger of invisible gods.”

By gods, he means the “bond vigilantes,” who advocate spending cuts to reduce the fiscal deficit to enable the bond market to become stronger, resulting in greater confidence in the economy.

The biggest advocate of deficit reduction during the Clinton Administration was former US Treasury secretary Robert Rubin.

As he put it in his memoirs, In an Uncertain Age ( 2003): “In important ways, the deficit had become a symbol of the government’s inability to manage its own affairs – and of our society’s inability to cope with economic challenges more generally, such as our global competitiveness, then much in question.

“The view that fiscal discipline was being restored contributed to lower interest rates and increased confidence, and that led to more spending and investment, which in turn led to job creation, lower unemployment rates, and increased productivity.”

Rubin is the mentor of former economic adviser to US President Barack Obama, Larry Summers, and the current US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, both of whom served under Rubin in the US Treasury.

Have they adopted fiscal reduction again as the way to restore confidence, despite Krugman’s view that there is a need for further government spending to ‘get back to the job of rebuilding the economy’?

Krugman is advocating Keynesian intervention in the economy, while the bond advocates are going back to the monetarist’s “let the market work”, by cutting back over-blown government spending back to sustainable levels.

Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, who broke ranks with the Washington Consensus during the Asian crisis on the irresponsibility of tightening interest rates and cutting fiscal deficits in the midst of a crisis, has just written a new book, Freefall: America, free markets, and the sinking of the world economy.

He has written the most powerful book on the current crisis – not a blow-by-blow account of what happened and whodunit – but a damnation of the crisis in economics and the crisis in morals.

“Economics had moved – more than economists would like to think – from being a scientific discipline into become free market capitalism’s biggest cheerleader.”

The mainstream economists had become so smug in their beliefs that the market was almost efficient that “it was a theological position, and it soon became clear that no piece of evidence or theoretical research would budge them away from it.”

Stiglitz does not hesitate to see the economics profession as a religion.

He aptly describes it as: “Within the cathedral of mainstream economics, there are many chapels devoted to specialised problems. Each has its own priests and even its own catechism.”

He is right. Despite the overwhelming evidence against their utility, the mainstream economists have convinced policymakers that there is little wrong with their models or efficient market Capital Asset Pricing Models.

Let’s get back to the business of making money. In a passionate defence of the under-privileged, Stiglitz argued that there is an underlying moral deficit – “far harder to forgive is the moral depravity – the financial sector’s exploitation of poor and even middle-class Americans.”

He laments the fact that “economics, unintentionally, provided sustenance to this lack of moral responsibility.”

What Stiglitz has demonstrated of the economic theologians is that if they believe that they are right, it must be their detractors who are wrong. So their energy is not spent on what is wrong with their beliefs or assumptions, but why those who try to demonstrate that the theory does not fit with reality are infidels.

Should governments cut deficits?

But let us come back to the big debate: Should governments cut deficits or increase them to get jobs going?

My personal view is that if the United States suffers from fundamentally excessive consumption financed by excessive leverage, then simply increasing public debt to substitute for Wall Street losses does not make sense.

De-leveraging has to happen some time, either in the private or public sector and de-leveraging means cutback in consumption.

The dilemma is whether government spending is for creating temporary jobs or for getting long-term growth going that would create new jobs.

Advanced country public debt is so high because the vested interests, from bankers to healthcare, basically would not allow the government to cut spending and instead push for tax decreases. This fiscal model in the long run is not viable.

The Keynesian argument that if the private sector lacks confidence to spend, the government should spend is not wrong. But Keynes did not spell out where the government should spend. Nor did he envisage that lobbyists can influence government spending to be wasteful. Hence, every prophet can be used by his or her successors to prove their own points of view. This is religion, not science.

One of my dreams is to write a film script about how Martians came to visit Earth in the year 2200, when the world is destroyed by a nuclear war.

As Martian archeologists explore the ruins, they notice that the tallest and the most important edifices left standing are the most magnificent. Deep in their basements, they find vaults made of tungsten steel that seem to protect the most sacred items.

In almost every city they find these buildings. When they manage to open the vaults, they find ashes of paper that could have been records of something important.

They think these are religious documents. Then, they discover some small coins, objects for which the Martians have no use. In each coin, they finally decipher the words: In God we Trust.

The Martians conclude that in the last days of Earth, there flourished an important religion that worshipped a god called Money, and these temples were called banks. They did not find traces of the priests, who were called economists.

·Tan Sri Andrew Sheng is adjunct professor at Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, and Tsinghua University, Beijing. He has served in key positions at Bank Negara, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission, and is currently a member of Malaysia’s National Economic Advisory Council. He is the author of the book, From Asian to Global Financial Crisis.