http://money.cnn.com/2009/06/05/retirement/next_crisis_americas_debt.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2009060912
China's fraught relations with the International Monetary Fund are driven by two conflicting agendas - the country's effort to gain unimpeded access to resources in the developing world on bilateral terms, and its interest in using the IMF's facilities as a international organization to issue Special Drawing Rights (SDR) assets to help Beijing diversify away from the US dollar.
At the same time, the West is trying to incorporate China, Brazil, Russia and India, the "BRIC" countries, into the IMF system and thereby assert the continued relevance of Western financial institutions and leadership in the midst of the worst crisis since the modern international regime was created after World War II.
There is a growing sense of urgency behind China's engagement with the IMF as America's enormous recession-fighting budget deficit causes US bond yields to creep up.
The world is starting to share Beijing's publicized anxiety about inflation eroding the value of the dollar and is beginning to think about the unthinkable - a future in which the US dollar is gradually stripped of its historical role as the international currency and something else, maybe the SDR, replaces it.
The potential exists for an important evolution in the function of the IMF - if the Barack Obama administration can keep its eye on the ball and overcome Republican opposition.
The International Monetary Fund and the People's Republic of China do not make for an easy fit. In fact, it's hard to think of two institutions further apart in philosophy and practice than the IMF and the PRC.
In Asia, China's continued economic success during and after the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 is an open rebuke to the monetary and exchange rate policies promoted by the IMF as the solution to the region's ills.
In the southern hemisphere, China has sold itself as anti-IMF, providing needed investment to ostracized regimes without onerous calls for reform. Now, the global financial system has experienced a major failure triggered by abuses in the developed countries that once used the IMF as their monetary and financial lawgiver to the developing world, and the BRIC countries are being called upon to help save the IMF's bacon.
China cares enough about the world financial system not to let it go down the tubes and is willing to support the IMF in its role as bailout provider of last resort to the hapless European economies like Latvia and Iceland that followed the Wall Street pied piper to financial oblivion.
At the Group of 20 summit in London this spring, China pledged to pony up US$40 billion to do its part in a joint international effort to boost the IMF's lending capacity by $500 billion. But China's engagement with this fading relic of American financial dominance is cautious, equivocal and, it appears, somewhat self-serving.
The IMF and China have been going head-to-head in the developing world. The IMF and its sister project lending organization, the World Bank, have historically demanded conformity to Western requirements for transparency, deregulation, and denationalization - structural reforms - as a precondition for financial assistance. As long as the West was able to maintain a de facto monopoly on foreign assistance this approach won the acquiescence of the targeted states - if not happy economic results.
However, when the Chinese government offered an alternative - one that took the form of a bilateral negotiations between equal sovereign states - developing nations were eager to take it.
Bush misses Africa play
The story of how the George W Bush administration took its eye off the geopolitical ball and allowed the Chinese to steal an economic and diplomatic march in Africa is now the stuff of legend. The case of Angola - where China blew an Italian bidder for an oil concession out of the water with a pre-emptive $2 billion infrastructure credit - is cited as the world's wake-up call. Now Angola has eclipsed Saudi Arabia as China's largest supplier of oil.
China's success in Africa has compelled the IMF to do a little soul searching. Case in point: the revealingly named Exogenous Shocks Facility, intended to provide rapid assistance to developing countries crushed by the collapse in the international economy through no fault of their own.
The IMF also excited a flurry of enthusiasm when it announced that it would abandon the structural reform requirements that are the hallmark of its detested and counterproductive interference in local economies. However, it turned out that the structural reform requirements have only been waived for a select group of countries already meeting the IMF criteria, so that a round of paperwork can be eliminated.
It appears that the IMF is trying to work through the crisis as an isolated anomaly, not a sea change in the structure of the international economy and a power shift away from the United States and Europe model of open-market globalization to the rise of a network of Chinese-style, managed, bilateral and multilateral trading arrangements in goods and services.
The IMF has not endeared itself to Beijing as it has championed the interests of Western creditors, the US government, and American and European mining firms to pressure the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to renegotiate one of China's biggest overseas resources deals - a $9 billion infrastructure project for copper and cobalt transaction.
China's ambassador to the DRC angrily characterized the IMF's stance as "blackmail". Yu Yongding of the Chinese Academy of Sciences was undoubtedly reflecting internal official attitudes to the IMF when he spoke to China Daily in the run-up to the G-20 conference: "They [developed countries and pressure groups] have already targeted our wallets but we have many reasons to object," said Yu, a formal central bank advisor. "If we do so, it will seem like the poor is rescuing the rich, wouldn't it?"
He added that China's friends in the developing world have cautioned against giving loans to the IMF. "Even if you do decide to do so, the sum should not be big," Yu quoted them as saying.
Reuters also picked up on the story, describing a white paper critical of the IMF's coddling of rich states that the Chinese government circulated prior to the summit:
[The] section on the IMF touches a raw nerve because of China's belief that the Fund spends too much time lecturing developing countries on how to run their economies.
According to this line of thought, the Washington-based fund could have tempered the present crisis by sounding the alarm earlier and louder about the economic imbalances building up in rich countries, notably the United States, whose voting share gives it the power to veto the most important IMF decisions.
"The IMF should strengthen oversight over macroeconomic policies of all parties, particularly the major reserve currency economies, and provide oversight information and improvement recommendations to its members on a regular basis ... " the paper says.
Insurmountable bias
The Chinese consensus appears to be that the IMF's pro-Western bias is institutionalized and, for the time being, insurmountable. The key advantage of the developed countries resides in the fact that important decisions require an 85% vote.
The United States holds a 17% voting share, giving it a veto. Even if the US vote share dropped below 17%, the change would be more symbolic than real unless there was also a massive shift in voting rights away from US allies in Europe and Japan to the BRIC countries and the developing world.
Not surprisingly, China is already looking beyond the IMF to a new regional grouping to provide financial support to Asian economies.
On May 29, 2009, Forbes reported:
A key breakthrough came early this month when ASEAN plus three, [the Association of Southeast Asian Nations plus China, Japan and South Korea] ... finally agreed in Bali to create a US$120 billion regional reserve fund. The deal came after China and Japan, the two largest contributors to the fund, buried their hatchets and agreed to each fork out an equal sum, or 32% of the total needed to create the fund.
If the regional reserve fund succeeds, it would represent the first regional institution in Asia that is blessed with real financial power and with teeth to enforce discipline among members. But the hard part is only beginning, with negotiations to set up a multilateral surveillance institution now under way. The success, or the lack of it, will determine how far Asia will move towards regional integration. Hadi Soesastro, senior fellow of Jakarta-based Centre for Strategic And International Studies, said the new institution wasn't designed "to replace the IMF, but to supplement it."
Beijing appears most interested in exploiting the IMF's desire for increased cash and continued relevance as a means of reducing China's exposure on the inflation-threatened US dollar.
US inflation is a major concern of the Chinese government. The US budget deficit in 2009 will reach an eye-popping 12.9% of gross domestic product. The IMF (irony alert) endorses a 3% cap for states with their financial house in order.
The US should take China's interests into consideration "so that your own interest can be protected," Yu said. "You should not try to inflate away your debt burden." China could still diversify some of its Treasury holdings into euros or commodities, Yu added.
"Yes, some people say the euro is very weak," Yu said. "Okay, weak is good, we'll buy very cheap."
The best outcome for China would still be to negotiate with the US and reach agreement on its Treasury holdings, Yu said. "The borrower should keep their promises," he added. "The US should be a responsible country."
But it also doesn't want to be under the US gun and be forced to buy Treasury bills to finance a yawning deficit simply because Beijing has no place else to put its money. So China is looking for options, and not just the euro threat that Yu wielded.
A roundtable of Chinese economists convened on the occasion of Treasury Secretary Geithner's visit this month expressed the majority view that holding US bonds was risky, and advised the careful, long-term diversification of dollar holdings into "tangible and strategic commodities," equities and bonds, and through overseas mergers and acquisitions.
In addition, China is pursuing several avenues for decreasing dollar exposure that involve utilizing and repurposing the primary supranational financial institution - the IMF. Somewhat opportunistically, China proposed that the IMF sell off 400 tons of gold in order to finance its operations. One of the main likely purchasers of that much gold would, of course, be China, which recently surpassed Switzerland as the world's fifth-largest holder of gold reserves.
Nudging IMF away from dollar
In a development of considerably more long-term significance, China is also trying to nudge the IMF into creating large-volume and liquid internationally tradable financial instruments that are not dollar-based.
China's stated interest in funding the IMF's emergency fund through a $40 billion bond purchase is bound up in the suddenly not-so-arcane issue of Special Drawing Rights. In March, the president of the People's Bank of China, Zhou Xiaochuan, proposed that the world should look at transitioning from the US dollar to the SDR as a reserve currency.
The SDR is a little-used fiat currency that the IMF is authorized to issue. It is based on a basket of currencies: at present, the US dollar accounts for 44%, the euro 34%, the British pound 11% and the Japanese yen 11%.
Since the SDR is a universally accepted international financial instrument whose value does not rely on solely on the dollar, the Chinese are interested in it as a chance to hedge, albeit partially, against a potentially tanking dollar.
Zhou invoked John Maynard Keynes, who proposed a supranational currency at the time of the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 as the most logical, multi-polar solution to international settlement of accounts. However, Mr Zhou probably derives his enthusiasm for the SDR from philanthropist George Soros and economist Joseph Stiglitz, enthusiastic cheerleaders for the SDR, rather than from a close reading of Mr Keynes.
Both Soros and Stiglitz consider the US dollar an inappropriate currency for the international settlement of accounts because of the vast deficits the US has been running.
Foreign governments with a surplus of dollars find that the only safe haven of any size is the US Treasury market, so that the world economy is, in effect, doing business in order to subsidize US deficit spending. Shifting toward a new international currency, such as the IMF's SDR, would tie currency creation to actual terms of trade instead of to the US deficit; the US government would be forced to live within its means; developing countries would invest their SDRs in development projects instead of Treasuries; and nirvana would ensue shortly.
China's floating of the SDR issue provoked a spasm of terror on America's far-right wing, which raised the specter of a new world currency supplanting the dollar inside the United States. Among mainstream economists, the general response has been that replacement of the dollar by the SDR in international settlements is "not gonna happen".
Despite professions of bafflement and scorn from Western economists, the prospect of SDR bonds has elicited strong interest from all the BRIC countries, especially Russia - an indication that people who actually run economies rather than simply talk about them find the SDRs a potentially valuable and significant development.
Indeed, the evolving relationship between the IMF, the SDR, and China offers some interesting wrinkles. The potential creation of SDRs is connected to the "New Arrangements to Borrow" (NAB) - the initiative announced at the Group of 20 summit to increase the IMF's ability to lend by $500 billion.
The NAB is designed to be pain- and cost-free: a pre-emptive show of financial force modeled on the guarantees the US government is providing to American financial institutions, in this case demonstrating that the IMF was backed by an additional $500 billion in commitments.
The purpose is to convince the financial markets that banks and markets in target countries are backed by ample resources from the IMF and are viable, so that credit will ease and lending resume - without the IMF (or its backers) having to actually disburse the cash.
The philosophy was recently put on display in Poland, which received a $20 billion commitment - not $20 billion - from the IMF as an expression of confidence in its reasonably healthy economy and financial sector.
The proposed $100 billion contribution to the NAB proposed by President Obama at the Group of 20 meeting isn't cash either - it's a credit line, to be drawn if and when the IMF needs it. Japan has already provided a similar $100 billion facility.
Cash - not credit
Interestingly, the BRIC countries aren't interested in offering a credit line, despite the seemingly attractive possibility that it might never be called on. They want to expend hard cash to lend money to the IMF today - by buying bonds - and get some of those diversified SDRs in return.
Surprisingly, the dominant force in the IMF - the Obama administration - does not appear hostile to the SDR.
Obama's economic brain, Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag, is a follower of Stiglitz. There are signs that the Obama administration accepts the idea that being able to fund US deficits through creation of international fiat currency creates a moral hazard, and that China's desire to move away from the dollar is understandable and, from a macroeconomic point of view, perhaps even desirable.
Whether the NAB facility and the coveted SDRS ever materialize will be decided by running the gauntlet of the US Congress. Unfortunately, the Obama administration seems to be recapitulating, rather disastrously, its missteps on the closing of Guantanamo.
The remaining $400 billion in support is contingent on the US coming up with its $100 Billion - just as, in the case of the Guantanamo closure, Europe was going to take Uyghur detainees if the US took a few....
The White House has not been able to frame or sell the IMF credit line very effectively. Domestic consensus building has largely been limited to the release of a letter from the Bretton Woods Association - albeit with an impressive bipartisan list of signatories including Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Volker, Brent Scowcroft, Colin Powell, and Robert Rubin - urging arrangement of the credit. [1]
Instead of simply defining the $100 billion as a credit, Orszag awkwardly characterized it for budget purposes as a low-risk swap of assets whose risk, if it took place, had a 5% risk of default, that is a budgetary cost of $5 billion. [2]
In order to speed approval of the credit line, the IMF credit line was tacked on to the Supplemental Appropriation for the Iraq and Afghan wars. The Senate passed the appropriation but House Republicans have seized on the issue - as they did the case of Guantanamo prisoners - as a way to defeat Obama both domestically and in the eyes of the international community.
It looks like the NAB issue will be misleadingly painted as a $100 billion giveaway to bail out Old Europe and a profanation of the sacred cause of funneling $98 billion to deserving troops and contractors without distracting amendments.
The White House's efforts to whip the bill through the House of Representatives are complicated by liberal anti-war and anti-IMF activists' attempt to add about 40 Democratic "no votes" to the Republicans' and defeat the Supplemental.
The Obama administration will have to decide if it is worth expending its political capital to fight for the rather remote and abstract imperative of a contingency fund for the IMF. If it doesn't, the entire refinancing of the IMF may go down the tubes.
For the purposes of China, the NAB will offer an interesting possibility if it goes ahead. If the credit was drawn down, the US would be holding IMF securities denominated in SDRs - which it could sell to China. Likewise for the Japanese $100 billion and, presumably, the other credit lines. And those proposed bonds will be denominated in SDRs also.
Half a Trillion dollars in SDR-denominated securities is not going to topple the US dollar from its throne as the world's reserve currency. But it would provide a significant haven for a chunk of China's US dollar reserves - now north of $1.5 trillion - if and when Beijing decides that it wants to decrease its exposure to the dollar.
And it would give China a compelling reason to support the survival of the IMF - and the continued creation of SDRs.....
This is a tale of two very powerful nations. One, called the world’s only Superpower, has a very aggressive foreign policy with a massive network of military installations around this planet. The other, the world’s skyrocketing economic power, has a low-key foreign policy and no real military presence except within its borders. America and China, with two distinctly different philosophies and agendas are on a collision course that will determine which of them will lead the world in the decades to follow.
China is ruled by a Communist government, but it also has a capitalistic economic system. Among major industrial nations, China has the most dynamic, fastest growing economy. Its projected growth for 2009 is 6 percent while America and the rest of the world are just trying to survive. Its military budget is minuscule, less than 10 percent of America’s. It is involved in no foreign wars. Because its economy depends a great deal on petroleum imports, it has been very active in setting up contracts and agreements for oil all around the world, including South America, with very aggressive business and diplomatic efforts.
America is a democratic republic, governed by an elected president and Congress with a capitalistic economic system. Its economy has been in a steady decline for some time as U.S. corporations have aggressively outsourced millions of manufacturing jobs. Its military budget is larger than all other major industrialized nations in the world combined. The U.S. maintains a military presence in more than 750 installations around the world and is involved in conflicts and occupation in both Iraq and Afghanistan. It imports most of its petroleum needs from foreign sources and its military is actively engaged in securing and protecting its oil interests in various parts of the world.
Yes, these are two very powerful nations whose agendas in world affairs, economic strategies, and use of military resources could hardly be more different. And, yet, these two nations are locked together in the world’s largest economic arrangement -- at least for the time being.
How did America ever get to the point where it is so dependent on Chinese manufacturing and the need to continually borrow from it to finance those purchases? How did America go from once being the premier creditor nation in the world to the premier debtor nation?
Since the 1980s, America has transformed itself from the world’s premier manufacturing juggernaut into a nation that has concentrated on outsourcing manufacturing to nations all over the world while morphing into a service economy. The long-time tenuous and adversarial relationship between unions and managements finally caused a total rupture that saw corporations put outsourcing into high gear. That enriched CEOs, increased profits and stock values, enriched investors and, thereby, initiated the demise of the American working class.
At that point, manufacturing, the cornerstone of America, began a rapidly escalating decline. This was the defining moment for an economy that relies on consumers for 70 percent of GDP. When that turn away from manufacturing and embrace of rampant outsourcing took place, it guaranteed an ongoing decline in its economy as the purchasing power of the working class Americans began to erode.
During this period, Japan was the rising economic star and began accelerating its manufacturing engine. China was not much of a real factor as a top economic player but it was beginning to show real potential power. So Japan’s presence on the American stage underwent a stage of rapid growth as it entered into US automobile and electronics markets as a major force that could provide quality products at extremely competitive prices.
How did the U.S. corporations react to this potential threat to their supremacy? They continued their process of outsourcing every type of manufacturing that they could to whatever overseas sources with cheap labor they could find. Of course, the U.S. auto industry years before had set up manufacturing plants in Europe and other nations overseas. Now they would watch as various foreign auto manufacturers, Japanese, German, and others returned the favor and set up plants in America.
So here we are, but what does the future hold? Well, China holds the trump cards and most of the aces. It patiently watches and waits as America continues to spend itself into economic oblivion with a never-ending war on so-called Islamic terrorists and the continued massive importing of products once produced in America.
China, at least for the time being, is continuing to loan us billions of dollars while watching our trade and national deficits rise to astronomical heights. Out of the nearly $2 trillion that China holds in foreign exchange reserves, about $1 trillion is in U.S. government securities. This massive transfer of wealth from the U.S. to China cannot continue unabated for it is eroding the economic foundation of our nation. What must we do?
One of the answers to this dilemma is that America simply cannot and must not allow this situation to continue to deteriorate. It must rebuild its manufacturing base and reverse the destructive outsourcing of jobs or we will never restore our economic foundation.
Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary under President Clinton and a noted economist, in a recent article indicated that we are losing routine jobs, including traditional manufacturing jobs but not to worry because they will be replaced in the future by “symbolic-analytic work” by “people who analyze, manipulate, innovate and create. These people are responsible for research and development, design and engineering or for high-level sales, marketing and advertising. They’re composers, writers and producers. They’re lawyers, journalists, doctors and management consultants.”
Well, Mr. Reich is the economist and I am not, but I don’t buy into his reasoning at all. This appears to be the same old theory, slightly repackaged, that we heard in the 1980s about how the service economy was the way of the future for America. My point is this: you can create all the symbolic-analytic jobs you want but, if we do not have a sizable portion of the American workforce performing work that takes some form of raw materials, together with labor, to create products that are purchased by Americans and exported to foreign nations, the majority of Americans will not have the purchasing power to fuel our consumer-driven economy.
We can rebuild our manufacturing base if we can change the poisoned philosophy of corporate outsourcing that has led to enormous corporate profits and the destruction of the American workforce. Mr. Obama and the Congress must enact appropriate legislation, and they most certainly have the power, that provides tax credits to corporations that do not outsource or to those that bring jobs back. Secondly, those corporations that continue to outsource must be assessed tax penalties.
In addition to returning outsourced basic manufacturing jobs to America, a great potential lies with developing a massive new green industrial sector where government stimulus dollars and private funds create new jobs to manufacture solar panels, windmills, rapid transit systems and various new energy sources to replace fossil fuels. Besides reversing the outsourcing of American jobs, there is no better way to solve our economic problems than by the aggressive promotion of programs to develop new sources of energy.
It’s time for the American people to say “enough is enough” and demand that President Obama begin the very necessary process of reversing our extremely aggressive and expensive military presence around the world that is causing a terrible hemorrhaging of our economic base. Our national debt is increasing so rapidly that it is becoming unsustainable. Our foreign wars, occupations and the maintenance of that huge complex of military installations around the world are bleeding America dry. Our government must understand that it is now time to scale back this entire military machine before it is too late and we find ourselves entering national bankruptcy. The question is how in the world do Obama and our leaders in Congress not understand that our military actions and policies are bringing America to the edge of bankruptcy?
What will happen if we do not have the wisdom and the courage to change? First of all, our debtor position with China will reach such massive proportions that China, at some point, will announce that it can no longer continue lending America the many billions of dollars as in the past; and that, in fact, it will put a moratorium on any more loans until America puts its economic and monetary systems in order. At this point, the value of the dollar would be in distinct danger and could unravel so quickly that it would no longer be used as the world’s reserve currency.
The funding for the entire military complex around the entire world would rapidly begin to dry up. The U.S. would have to close the majority of these bases. And when that happened, what in the world would we do with the thousands upon thousands of our military that, when discharged, would have no job opportunities in a failing economy?
Signs of great concern are beginning to emerge from China. A report coming out of China states that the chairman of the state-controlled China Construction Bank, Guo Shuqing, is looking into the possibility of issuing loans to Chinese import/export companies in yuan, the base Chinese currency. This would allow domestic Chinese and foreign trading companies to use the yuan to settle their debts instead of the U.S. dollar. Also, China has been switching their U.S. treasury securities from longer to shorter terms recently.
I am not saying that China wants the American economy to collapse -- not at all, for China knows that America is its cash cow, for now, and it would be happy to continue to feed at this financial trough. However, realists that they are, the Chinese clearly see that America is headed on a dangerous course that threatens to collapse its economic foundation and they may be positioning themselves for that eventuality.
Another scenario, not a pretty one, would involve foreign creditor nations, most notably China, buying up all sorts of American corporations. In fact, this scenario is already underway with Chrysler and General Motors both going into bankruptcy proceedings. Chrysler will survive, at least for a while, with Fiat of Italy owning most of the assets and managing the operations. General Motors is shedding several auto divisions, with a Chinese industrial conglomerate buying the Hummer line of GMC. This scenario may be the model for the future, as more and more U.S. corporations fail because of bad management and greed and various foreign nations, with China at the forefront, acquiring American corporate resources for pennies, nickels or dimes on the dollar.
America has now painted itself into a corner economically. There are few signs that the Obama administration and the Congress understand the urgent need to aggressively promote a rebirth of manufacturing and rapidly reduce our military presence across the planet. If they do not have the vision and the courage and cannot dedicate themselves to the best interest of the American people, then this is what will happen: China will become the preeminent economic power in the world. The American dollar will no longer have any significant effect on world commerce and will be replaced. Our vast military establishment around the world will rapidly disintegrate, as there will be no funds to further fuel its existence. At that point, America will have forfeited its position as the world’s leading economic power and as the lone Superpower.
Message to President Obama and the U.S. Congress: If ever there was a time for real change in America, that time is now! .Notes
1. To view the document, click here.
2. See http://cboblog.cbo.gov/?p=270
3. http://seekingalpha.com/article/138388-more-on-china-s-efforts-to-hedge-against-its-usd-holdings
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