On the market side, the China haters are looking more and more ridiculous. Not that I’m a China bull. I’m not smart enough to say that. And I have money in China. But I am smart enough and am surrounded by even smarter people who have led me to believe there is no hard landing. So on the market side, the China naysayers are wrong.
On the political side, the China haters who think the country is stealing all our Nike shoe and Optimus Prime assemblying jobs thanks to their currency manipulation are also wrong. For the second time this year, the U.S. Treasury Department said in its report to Congress on international economic and exchange rate policies that, wait for it…China is not a currency manipulator. The two or three guys advising Mitt Romney on China were wronger than Tim Tebow starting as QB for the Jets.
“The Treasury Department once again made the right call on China’s currency policy in its report to Congress. Labeling China a currency ‘manipulator’ would do little to help us reach the goal of a fully convertible currency and market-driven exchange rate for China,” said John Frisbie, president of the U.S. China Business Council, a lobby of multinationals working in China.
“Adding the very public ‘manipulator’ tag might simply produce pressure within China to slow down progress on this (forex) issue,” he said in a statement Tuesday.
China’s exchange rate has strengthened over 30 percent against the dollar over the past several years. The upshot is that the exchange rate has little to do with the U.S. trade balance or employment. Even as the renmimbi weakened, the U.S. trade deficit with China worsened.
Of course, not being a currency manipulator doesn’t mean that the renmimbi (RMB) is properly valued.
From the report:
The renminbi has appreciated by 9.3 percent in nominal terms and 12.6 percent in real terms against the dollar since June 2010. China’s trade and current account surpluses both have fallen to 2.6 percent of GDP from peaks of 8.8 and 10.1 percent of GDP, respectively. The Chinese authorities have substantially reduced the level of official intervention in exchange markets since the third quarter of 2011, and China has taken a series of steps to liberalize controls on capital movements, as part of a broader plan to move to a more flexible exchange rate regime. In light of these developments, Treasury has concluded that the standards identified in Section 3004 of the Act during the period covered in this Report have not been met with respect to China. Nonetheless, the available evidence suggests the RMB remains significantly undervalued, and further appreciation of the RMB against the dollar and other major currencies is warranted.” China’s real effective exchange rate (REER) – a measure of its overall cost-competitiveness relative to its trading partners – has appreciated since China initiated currency reform in mid-2005, after declining between 2001 and 2005. From July 2005 to October 2012, China’s real effective exchange rate appreciated by 27 percent. The REER appreciated particularly rapidly in the last several months of 2011, resulting in total REER appreciation of 6.2 percent over the course of 2011. Over the ten months of 2012, China’s REER has been unchanged.
The International Monetary Fund concluded that the RMB was moderately undervalued against a broad basket of currencies, and said that the RMB was undervalued by between 5 and 10 percent as of July 2012.
Reserve accumulation, an indicator of the degree of Chinese intervention in the currency market, has slowed markedly since the third quarter of 2011 as China buys less U.S. debt.
Even with the reduced pace of dollar accumulation, China’s official foreign exchange reserves remain exceptionally high compared to those of other economies, and well beyond established benchmarks of reserve adequacy. As of end-September 2012, the PBOC held $3.3 trillion in foreign reserves, equivalent to 42 percent of China’s GDP, or about $2,440 for every Chinese citizen.
10 Things “The End of Cheap China” Means for You
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By Kenneth Rapoza, Forbes Contributor
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Your espresso will get more expensive . . .
China, traditionally a tea-drinking nation, is now Starbucks’ largest market outside of the U.S., and the company plans to have more than a thousand cafés in the country by 2015. The Chinese middle class’ growing taste for premium coffee is causing commodity prices to soar; in 2011 Arabica bean prices hit their highest peak in over three decades, and analysts attributed that to fast demand growth in China as well as in Brazil and Indonesia. By Kenneth Rapoza, Forbes Contributor Covering Brazil, Russia, India & China.
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