Beat On The New York Times Columnist With A Baseball Bat

Paul Krugman at The New York Times:

To give you a sense of the problem: Widespread complaints that China was manipulating its currency — selling renminbi and buying foreign currencies, so as to keep the renminbi weak and China’s exports artificially competitive — began around 2003. At that point China was adding about $10 billion a month to its reserves, and in 2003 it ran an overall surplus on its current account — a broad measure of the trade balance — of $46 billion.

Today, China is adding more than $30 billion a month to its $2.4 trillion hoard of reserves. The International Monetary Fund expects China to have a 2010 current surplus of more than $450 billion — 10 times the 2003 figure. This is the most distortionary exchange rate policy any major nation has ever followed.

And it’s a policy that seriously damages the rest of the world. Most of the world’s large economies are stuck in a liquidity trap — deeply depressed, but unable to generate a recovery by cutting interest rates because the relevant rates are already near zero. China, by engineering an unwarranted trade surplus, is in effect imposing an anti-stimulus on these economies, which they can’t offset.

So how should we respond? First of all, the U.S. Treasury Department must stop fudging and obfuscating.

Twice a year, by law, Treasury must issue a report identifying nations that “manipulate the rate of exchange between their currency and the United States dollar for purposes of preventing effective balance of payments adjustments or gaining unfair competitive advantage in international trade.” The law’s intent is clear: the report should be a factual determination, not a policy statement. In practice, however, Treasury has been both unwilling to take action on the renminbi and unwilling to do what the law requires, namely explain to Congress why it isn’t taking action. Instead, it has spent the past six or seven years pretending not to see the obvious.

Will the next report, due April 15, continue this tradition? Stay tuned.

Ryan Avent at Free Exchange at The Economist:

But that’s just the warm-up. Here’s the call to action:

Some still argue that we must reason gently with China, not confront it. But we’ve been reasoning with China for years, as its surplus ballooned, and gotten nowhere: on Sunday Wen Jiabao, the Chinese prime minister, declared — absurdly — that his nation’s currency is not undervalued. (The Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates that the renminbi is undervalued by between 20 and 40 percent.) And Mr. Wen accused other nations of doing what China actually does, seeking to weaken their currencies “just for the purposes of increasing their own exports.”

But if sweet reason won’t work, what’s the alternative? In 1971 the United States dealt with a similar but much less severe problem of foreign undervaluation by imposing a temporary 10 percent surcharge on imports, which was removed a few months later after Germany, Japan and other nations raised the dollar value of their currencies. At this point, it’s hard to see China changing its policies unless faced with the threat of similar action — except that this time the surcharge would have to be much larger, say 25 percent.

I don’t propose this turn to policy hardball lightly. But Chinese currency policy is adding materially to the world’s economic problems at a time when those problems are already very severe. It’s time to take a stand.

This is really remarkable. Mr Krugman is careful to explain why we shouldn’t fear that China, as a major creditor, has the leverage to punish America, but it seems as though he has given no thought at all to what leverage America has over China. Neither does he seem to pay the least mind to the potential fallout from such a reckless rush to a more aggressive approach to China. Perhaps the decision to impose these surcharges will have the desired effect. Or perhaps, the Chinese government will retaliate, touching off a trade war at the worst possible economic moment. The potential upside to Mr Krugman’s recommendation is trifling; the potential downside is massive.

And Mr Krugman seems entirely uninterested in the domestic political constraints facing China’s leaders. He doesn’t consider for a second the possibility that a bullying strategy on America’s part might make China less likely to do what the administration wants. Why on earth would a nationalistic nation anxious to establish itself as great power want to come off to all observers as a weakling in the face of American bluster? Mr Krugman would paint China into a corner, forcing them to take steps detrimental to all involved.

The general tone of his column—focused on toughness, insensitive to the internal politics of foreign nations, blind to potential negative outcomes, reckless and impatient—is familiar. It looks like nothing so much as the argumentation deployed by the Bush adminstration as it rushed to war in Iraq. Mr Krugman was prescient and prudent in fighting back against that misguided policy. He would do well to stop for a moment, take a deep breath, and think again before urging America to “take a stand”, damn the consequences.

He should respect China enough to know that its leaders understand that RMB appreciation is in their interest. And he should be humble enough to understand that patience and reserve is far more likely to lead to his desired outcome than ill-considered sabre rattling.

Krugman responds:

I never thought of it that way: Ryan Avent says that my advocacy of a get-tough approach to the renminbi is just like the Bush administration’s push for war with Iraq.

But now that he mentions it, it’s true, it’s true! My case for action is entirely based on dubious claims made by unstable informants with code names like “Curveball”, questionable evidence about things like aluminum tubes, and obviously forged letters allegedly from Niger. The actual, public facts and figures I cited have nothing to do with it.

And the real tell is the fact that I’m closely following arguments made by rabble-rousers like Fred Bergsten and the Institute for International Economics, which, um, is a big supporter of free trade and international cooperation … but nonetheless is just like PNAC.

Oh, and I’m showing disrespect for China’s leaders by not giving them credit for understanding the need for appreciation, even though they consistently say that no change in the exchange rate is warranted. The respectful thing would be to assume that everything they say in public about the issue is a lie.

Ryan has me nailed.

Avent responds:

This is extremely disappointing, because it ignores the substance of my criticism and because it so wildly distorts the analogy I drew. I never said Mr Krugman was using false data. I never said he was relying on faulty sources. I never implied anything like that. What I suggested was that he seemed to be ignoring the potential for things to go badly wrong with his plan, overestimating the potential that they may go right, and misreading the net benefit of both of those potential outcomes. His response basically sidesteps all of these issues.Let me briefly rephrase my argument and see if I can’t provoke a more substantive answer from Mr Krugman. I agree with him that there would be some benefit to China, America, and the rest of the world if China allowed its currency to appreciate against the dollar. But it seems to me that this benefit is easily overstated; both China and America can trace their current account situations to significant structural imbalances, and even without an end to the dollar peg, America’s trade balance with China has improved and continues to improve through the recovery. It also seems to me that an aggressive American push for currency revaluation is unlikely to work, because China’s government does not want to be seen, at home and abroad, as a weakling in the face of American pressure. And there is a not insignificant risk that America’s decision to “take a stand”, and particularly to pursue a series of trade surcharges, would provoke a trade war with China which, given the current feeble state of the global economic recovery, could prove extremely costly. The downside risk to such a policy is quite large relative to the potential upside from Chinese revaluation.

What’s more, I think China understands that it is in its interest to revalue and will do so eventually. Why do I think this? Well, China was more than willing to revalue before the onset of the global recession. Mr Krugman hints that I am the one being disrespectful to China for not taking its leadership at its word when they say that no change in the RMB exchange rate is warranted. But this is par for the course where currency levels are concerned. In America, it’s a time-honoured tradition for leaders in Washington to declare that a strong dollar is warranted, good, right, proper, and so on, despite the fact that this clearly isn’t the case. I suppose we could say that they’re fools or liars, but we generally just note that this is something they say because they feel it is in their interest to do so, for political and economic reasons. Meanwhile, it isn’t as though it’s been ages since a Chinese official hinted that RMB appreciation was just a matter of time.

Krugman responds:

I got a little snippy with Ryan Avent yesterday over the remminbi issue; I guess I don’t like being compared to Donald Rumsfeld. In any case, however, I think it would be useful for me to explain how I think about the current China syndrome, and why I believe that most of the responses I hear are missing the point. In what follows, I’ll focus on three questions: the macroeconomics of Chinese currency intervention, the fallacies of elasticity pessimism (which I’ll explain when I get there), and the political economy issue of how to deal with Chinese intransigence.

1. Macroeconomics of intervention

Let me start with a proposition: the right way to think about China’s exchange rate is, initially, not to think about the exchange rate. Instead, you should focus on China’s currency intervention, in which the government buys foreign assets and sells domestic assets, on a massive scale.

Although people don’t always think of it this way, what the Chinese government is doing here is engaging in massive capital export – artificially creating a huge deficit in China’s capital account. It’s able to do this in part because capital controls inhibit offsetting private capital inflows; but the key point is that China has a de facto policy of forcing capital flows out of the country.

Now, bear in mind the two basic balance of payments accounting identities:

Capital account + Current account = 0

Current account = Domestic savings – Domestic investment

By creating an artificial capital account deficit, China is, as a matter of arithmetic necessity, creating an artificial current account surplus. And by doing that, it is exporting savings to the rest of the world.

In normal times, you could argue that this policy provides benefits to the rest of the world, by reducing borrowing costs (although given what we did with those capital inflows, maybe not). But these aren’t normal times. We’re currently living in a world in which both central banks and governments are unable or unwilling to pursue sufficiently expansionary policies to eliminate mass unemployment; so it’s a paradox of thrift world, in which anyone who tries to save more reduces demand, reduces employment, and – because investment responds to excess capacity – ends up actually reducing investment. By exporting savings to the rest of the world, via an artificial current account surplus, China is making all of us poorer.

Notice that I didn’t mention the value of the renminbi at all in this account. It’s there implicitly: a weak renminbi is the mechanism through which China’s capital-export policy gets translated into physical exports of goods. But you want to keep your eye on the ball: it’s the artificial capital exports that are the driving force here.

What this means, in particular, is that you can disregard people who offer calculations suggesting that by some criterion – say, Balassa-Samuelson adjusted purchasing power parity – the renminbi isn’t undervalued. We know that the renminbi is grossly undervalued, not through questionable estimates that can be endlessly debated, but on a PPE (proof of the pudding is in the eating) basis: the current value of the renminbi is consistent with massive artificial capital export, and that’s that.

Avent responds:

This is a happy world, is it not, when Europe and America slap punitive import surcharges on China and China just sits there and takes it? What if China responds with tariffs of its own? What if it seeks to carve out its own regional trade bloc in Asia? What if it refuses to help America with Iran or North Korea? What if it occupies Taiwan? Where are the careful considerations of all the possible ways China might respond? Certainly we should be very aware of and concerned with these risks.

Especially since it was just one week ago that China central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan said of the dollar peg that, “These kinds of policies sooner or later will be withdrawn.”

So, to recap. In recent years, exchange rate shifts in China and America have not produced the changes in trade balances one might expect, suggesting that structural issues are an important reason for these persistent imbalances, further suggesting that the benefits of revaluation may not be that big. Meanwhile, despite China’s currency policy, the Chinese trade balance has shrunk. An aggressive campaign to get China to revalue might not generate the desired results, and it might lead to unpredictable and costly retaliation from the Chinese government. And there is recent evidence that Chinese leaders are aware of the problems with the dollar peg and plan to adjust it, even in the absence of American action.

So why roll the dice? I appreciate Mr Krugman’s discussion of the macroeconomic issues involved here, but he hasn’t begun to address why it’s vital to risk international comity over this.

Daniel Drezner:

It’s certainly true that the dollar was overvalued back in 1971.  What Krugman forgets to mention — and see if this sounds familiar — is that the Johnson and Nixon administrations contributed to this problem via a guns-and-butter fiscal policy.  They pursued the Vietnam War, approved massive increases in social spending, and refused to raise taxes to pay for it.  This macroeconomic policy created inflationary expectations and a “dollar glut.”  Foreign exchange markets to expect the dollar to depreciate over time. Other countries intervened to maintain the dollar’s value — not because they wanted to, but because they were complying with the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates. Nixon only went off the dollar after the British Treasury came to the U.S. and wanted to convert all their dollar holdings into gold.

In other words, the United States was the rogue economic actor in 1971 — not Japan or Germany.

So, how about acting multilaterally first before engaging in unilateral action that alienates America’s friends and allies alike?

Brad DeLong responds to Drezner:

I count four big howlers:

• Paul Krugman is not a neoconservative.
• There is no no multilateral institution that manages exchange rates within which the U.S. could work.
• The current overvaluation of the dollar vis-a-vis the renminbi is in no wise due to large current U.S. budget deficits.
• At the start of the 1970s other countries kept their pegs to the dollar rather than revaluing not because they were obliged by treaty to do so but because they wanted to: they had rejected U.S. requests for revaluation under Bretton Woods procedures.

Why would anybody do this?

More Drezner

Scott Sumner at Wall Street Pit:

Suppose China’s government began a new policy.  They announced their government would spend $500 billion each year adding to their foreign reserves, but would no longer peg the yuan.  Would that satisfy China’s critics?  Probably not, as Krugman noted the real issue is the Chinese accumulation of dollars, not the exchange rate per se.  If you are buying foreign reserves at a massive rate it is quite possible to lift exchange controls and let the currency float, and yet still end up with what most people would regard as an overvalued currency.  So the real question is whether China is justified in holding large and increasing quantities of foreign reserves.

I’d like to point out that there are many commonalities between China and 5 other East Asian economies; Japan, Taiwan, HK, Singapore and South Korea.  One of those similarities is that they all have huge stocks of foreign reserves.  In per capita terms China’s CA surplus is by far the smallest of any of the six East Asian powerhouse exporters.  The most recent data I could find in The Economist shows China’s CA surplus as $284.4 billion whereas the other five economies combine for a $286.7 billion surplus.  So if Krugman is right, those five economies actually are doing more damage to the world economy than China, which has 7 times the population and a modestly larger (PPP) GDP than other other five economies.

Krugman might respond that the other five economies are fairly wealthy, and have very low birthrates, so it makes sense for them to save a lot.  Their surpluses reflect the natural forces of their economy.  China is a developing country, and like South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s might be better off running deficits, and borrowing against future income.  There are many ways in which the government could use those funds to address domestic challenges.  Instead they accumulate massive stocks of foreign exchange, which help neither us nor the Chinese people.  I think that would be a respectable argument, but there are other considerations as well.  China faces a looming demographic nightmare that Korea did not face in the 1970s.  It is likely that in a few decades China will be much richer than today.  The hundreds of millions of Chinese that will then be retiring will expect to be provided with decent pensions.  Yet the Chinese social security system is woefully underfunded.  You can make a strong argument that the Chinese government should be setting aside a lot of money right now, in light of the fiscal challenges that they will face in the future.

I would add that there seems to be a big difference between East Asian and Western attitudes toward saving.  I think that there is a lot to be said for the high saving models developed by places like Singapore.  Even though I am a libertarian, I’d much prefer the sort of high forced saving/low tax economy of Singapore to the low saving/high tax economy that we have in the West.  Our fiscal situation reminds me of those guys who live week to week.  Who say “I should be able to swing that vacation to South Beach as long as my transmission doesn’t blow out on me.”  Yes, we should be able to just barely afford national health care as long as it doesn’t turn out to be much more expensive than expected, like Medicare turned out to be much more expensive than expected.  And if things really get bad we can always add a VAT.  Of course the Europeans already have a VAT, maybe they’re hoping some loose change will turn up under the cushions.  Seriously, in about 20 years, when the West is struggling to deal with ever-increasing debts, I predict that the Singapore high saving/low tax model will look clearly superior to the Western model.  So while there are many things I don’t like about the Chinese government, I am not willing to condemn them for setting aside a big pot of foreign exchange reserves.  It’s their choice.

Ryan McCarthy at Huffington Post:

In an interview with Bloomberg Television, Stephen Roach, Morgan Stanley’s Asia chairman blasted Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman over the latter’s stance on China’s economic policy.

Here’s the gist of the dispute: in comments earlier this week, Krugman said that the U.S. needs to get tough with China over its currency policy. According to Krugman, China is intentionally devaluing its currency in order to boost its booming export sector. Specifically, Krugman argues that a properly valued Chinese yuan could add 1.5 percent to global economic growth. (You can check out video of his comments here.)

Roach wasn’t having any of it. The U.S. needs to increase its savings rate, remake its economy and “handle its own business.” And, Roach told Bloomberg TV, the U.S. needs to stay out of Chinese affairs:

Here’s Roach:

I think we should take out the baseball bat on Paul Krugman. I think the advice is completely wrong. The US has had a conscious policy here of maintaining, quote, a strong and stable dollar. China is saying basically the same thing in terms of its stable currency. Isn’t it the height of hypocrisy for America to articulate to articulate a particular position in its currency but the Chinese are not allowed to do that, especially since they as a developing economy – with an embryonic financial system – need a currency anchor probably a lot more than a sophisticated, quote unquote, economies like the United States.”

Krugman responds:

I really don’t understand Roach’s argument here; he seems to have subscribed to the Underpants Gnomes theory of trade balances:

1. Increase savings
2. ?????
3. Exports!

To be honest, sometimes I feel that I’ve spent most of my adult life knocking down the same misunderstanding, over and over again. I wrote about more or less the same issue more than 20 years ago:

There is a widespread view that world payments imbalances can be remedied through increased demand in surplus countries and reduced demand in deficit countries, without any need for real exchange rate changes. In fact shifts in demand and real exchange rate adjustment are necessary complements, not substitutes.

Also, from the Bloomberg article:

“I’m a little curious what Steve thinks would happen if the U.S. increased savings” without a stronger yuan, Krugman said today. “Where would the demand” for goods and services come from, he asked. Boosting savings should be done “in the long run,” not now, he also said.

Krugman is “giving Washington very, very bad advice,” Roach said in a later interview when asked to respond to Krugman’s reaction to his remarks. “I totally reject his idea that savings is bad.”

(Btw, this was from a cell phone conversation held while I was, um, sitting on the beach).

What I wonder here is how Roach — or anyone thinks that increased savings would help right now. What would cause an attempt to increase savings to be translated into increased investment, or an improved trade balance, as opposed to simply a more depressed economy. Yes, I know that macroeconomics at the zero lower bound is different from the normal scene — but how can an economist as good as Steve Roach not get that after more or less two years in a liquidity trap?

Update: I probably should add that I never said anything about taking a baseball bat to China. That was Bloomberg’s characterization of what I’ve been saying, and not one I would agree with.