China's Debt Addiction

Who is Beijing kidding with its chest-thumping economic lectures?

The Chinese government and its media outlets are using Standard & Poor's U.S. credit downgrade to give Washington a tongue lashing for its "debt addiction." And it's no surprise that Beijing would take the chance to score points domestically and rebuke the know-it-alls at the U.S. Treasury, having been on the receiving end of their hectoring for so long. 

 On the other hand, who are the Chinese kidding with their chest-pounding economic nationalism? A People's Daily commentary yesterday threatened to use China's holdings of U.S. debt as a "financial weapon" to deter arms sales to Taiwan. The official Xinhua news agency's Saturday editorial was a hilarious moral lecture, suggesting that an addicted America's ability to print dollars should be put under "international supervision." But if borrowing is really an addiction that has sapped America's self-discipline, China is both the pusher and a user.

The real reason Beijing is anthropomorphizing the bond market is to deflect domestic criticism over losses on the investment of its $3.2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves. Chinese are asking why Beijing continues to lend their wealth to Americans rather than using it on development at home. The question arises from a misconception that Beijing has encouraged, which is that the reserves represent the earnings of the Chinese people, their "blood and sweat."

The reality is less admirable. The People's Bank of China (PBoC) accumulated its forex reserves by borrowing yuan from the Chinese people. The U.S. dollar assets and yuan liabilities are roughly balanced on the central bank's balance sheet. If the U.S. government is addicted to debt, so is China's.

The purpose of that precarious balance sheet is to subsidize exports by keeping the yuan's value low and deferring inflation. An economy like China's that is enjoying rapid productivity growth would normally see rising real wages and hence benign inflation that would increase the cost of its exports. Because that process has been stopped, China's exporters remain competitive across a range of labor-intensive products such as shoes and garments in which the country no longer has a true comparative advantage.

Were the PBoC to stop buying U.S. Treasurys and other dollar assets, the result would be an immediate increase in the yuan's value.

The losses on U.S. investments as the yuan slowly appreciates are one part of the cost for the export-subsidy policy.

The Chinese economy has become dangerously dependent on exports and investment in future export capacity for growth. Unwinding that dependence and encouraging domestic consumption requires boosting household incomes, which have been depressed by low interest rates on savings—another cost of Beijing's policies. Chinese leaders have been talking about rebalancing the economy in favor of consumption for the better part of a decade, but that can't happen as long as they continue to accumulate reserves.
In the short term Chinese threats to stop buying U.S. debt are empty, since there are no other asset markets deep and liquid enough to absorb the purchases needed to keep the yuan stable. Were China to buy euros or yen in sufficiently large quantities, it would soon run into a protectionist backlash in Europe and Japan as those nations ran trade deficits. The U.S. willingness to run a persistent trade deficit is key to the dollar's status as a reserve currency.

In the longer term, the world should hope that China does stop buying U.S. debt and makes the yuan convertible. China's economic policy makers understand that they have to liberalize their financial system and integrate it into the world economy. But that also means freeing the system from Communist Party political control, as well as breaking with powerful state-owned enterprises that benefit from export subsidies and cheap credit. This makes agreement between President Obama and the tea party look easy by comparison.

The U.S. has certainly allowed unsustainable spending to continue too long. But the Chinese should refrain from self-congratulation.

They'll endure more painful withdrawal symptoms than the U.S. will when the PBoC ends its own unsustainable borrowing.