Why we have a trade deficit with China

President Trump has said that the US trade deficit with China should have been “fixed” years ago. I agree, but for different reasons. Why do we run a deficit in trade with China?

The administration wants China to quit violating our copyright and patent laws, stop stealing our technology and forcing companies doing business in China to share technology. But what does that have to do with a trade deficit? We buy mostly consumer goods from China that are made using low tech, labor intensive processes. And why would we expect China to enforce our laws? Anyway, all countries since World War II have grown by importing better technology from the West. Japan was first. We should want that to happen so their people can grow out of poverty.

Some have accused China of being a currency manipulator, meaning that they keep their yuan artificially low in exchange for the US dollar so that their products are cheaper for Americans. That may have been true in the past but China has allowed its currency to float on the market for years and it has still drifted lower. Besides, no country in the world manipulates its currency the ways the Fed does the US dollar.

Why China will not be the world’s innovation leader

Remember Laura D'Andrea Tyson? A Republican Congress and Monica Lewinsky rescued us from her leftist economics when she was Chair of the under Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers. As far as we know she and Hillary were the only women in the White House that Clinton did not have an affair with.

Recently, Ms. Tyson warned us in “Avoiding the Sino-American Technology Trap” that China is about to become the innovation leader of the world because they have a five-year plan:

Building on its 13th Five Year Plan (in May 2016), the authorities established objectives for China to become an “innovative nation” by 2020, an “international innovation leader” by 2030, and a “world powerhouse of scientific and technological innovation” by 2050. It also committed to increasing its expenditure on research and development to 2.5% of GDP and almost doubling the number of patents filed per 10,000 people by 2020.

Tyson should know better than to place so much faith in central planning. After all, the defunct Soviet Union enjoyed similar five-year plans for much longer. If this is China’s 13th plan, they began in 1953 and their economy didn’t take off until the 1980s. What happened to the previous five-year plans?

The Jekyll and Hyde nature of individualism and what is means for China

Nobel-prize winning economist Edmund Phelps ties economic growth to the spread of individualism in his forthcoming book. A November 3 Streetwise column by James Mackintosh, “What Martin Luther Says About Capitalism,” summarizes Phelps’ book:

The more individualistic a country is, the better it has used its labor and capital. ...even in recent years, countries with more individualistic cultures have more innovative economies. They demonstrate a link between countries that surveys show are more individualist and total factor productivity, a proxy for innovation measuring growth due to more-efficient use of labor and capital. Less-individualistic cultures, such as France, Spain and Japan, showed less innovation than the individualistic U.S. 

In God is a Capitalist I summarize the work of Geert Hofstede who trail blazed research on the connection between individualism and economic growth in the 1970s, Shalom Schwartz in the 1990s, and William Easterly in 2011. All found very strong correlations between individualism and economic growth.

Trump's tariffs could sink Washington

Politicians have figured out that bashing China is a good way to attract vote. That’s why Donald Trump is doing it. It appeals to people who work and see jobs lost to cheaper products made across the Pacific. Hillary can’t appeal to those people because most of her constituency doesn’t work at all or works in government jobs that don’t compete with anyone anywhere.

But if Trump becomes president, as is likely, and he succeeds in raising tariffs on Chinese imports, he could destroy the federal government here’s why:

The federal government is spending about a trillion dollars per year more than what it takes in through taxes. That means it must borrow a trillion dollars. Who has that kind of money? The American people don’t because we don’t save enough and if we did we certainly wouldn’t loan it to that deadbeat Uncle Sam. Europe doesn’t have the savings. Japan has some but not enough. So most of what the federal government borrows comes from China.

Now the federal government requires US dollars, not Chinese yuan (officially the renminbi, but who can pronounce that?) No one can spend yuan in the US. Chinese save about 30% of their income, but in yuan. How can they get the dollars to loan to the US? They do it by selling stuff to US consumers for dollars. They sell those dollars to the Chinese government for yuan they can use in China to buy more Chinese made Cadillacs and ride their bullet trains. The Chinese government then uses those dollars to buy US debt and fund the US federal government deficit.

Caterpillar needed the Austrian business-cycle theory

Caterpillar is facing its fourth year of declining sales, the longest in its history. It expects total revenue this year to be 39% below its peak in 2012 and profits will be down 68%. Its stock is now 25% below its peak. Through the first six months of 2016, the company’s overall revenue was down 21% from the same period in last year.

CEO Doug Oberhelman is stepping down, but when he took the reins in 2010 the world, especially China, couldn’t get enough metals. Prices were soaring and everyone thought the good times would last. That’s the first mistake most investors and businessmen make – linear forecasting instead of thinking in terms of cycles. Oberhelman should have understood cycles after working for Caterpillar for 35 years. The capital goods sector is the most volatile in the business cycle. But he didn’t understand them. Caterpillar’s problems began when it invested heavily at the peak of a cycle according to an article in the Wall Street Journal:

China inflates its real estate

I have a Chinese friend who used to teach in a university in China. He reads news from home that doesn’t make it into the US media and tells me the more interesting stories. 

Lately he has been reading about real estate. He is a frustrated that many of his family members in China have become wealthy through real estate speculation while he missed out. They had tried to get him to invest with them years ago but he was certain at the time that prices would never rise as they have.

He told me recently the Chinese media reported that total value of real estate in the top three cities, Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, is priced more than all of the real estate in the US. Apartments with a thousand square feet in those cities sell for several million dollars.

My friend told me that China doesn’t have a property tax and just recently added a deduction for mortgage interest in order to encourage more speculation. He said the government wants prices to continue to rise because the state owns most of the land, so it reaps huge rewards when prices rise.

Training the Chinese dragon in economics

The story of China’s great leap forward to slightly freer markets is well known. Around 30 million people starved to death in the 1960s and the West fed the Chinese in the 1970s. Deng Xiaoping took over after Mao died and began looking for some way to make Communism work well enough to at least feed the people.

About the same time, a small group of farmers in a remote village rebelled against socialist farming by dividing up the land among them and selling their excess produce on the black market. They signed a contract binding each farmer to take care of the families of any farmers whom the state discovered and executed. After a couple of years, they couldn’t keep their success a secret any longer and Deng found out. But instead of executing the farmers, Deng made them national heroes and encouraged other farmers to do the same.

Bull Market in a China Shop

Markets that climb to dizzying heights over extended time periods are known as bulls for a reason: they buck. I titled my book on investing Financial Bull Riding for that reason. A bull has been breaking things in China’s stock market recently, falling as much as 30% from an ascent of 150% over the past year. 

The exchanges responded by freezing trading in as many as 50% of issues while the government forbade corporate executives and directors from selling any stock for six months, suspended initial public offering and made more loans available to investors. What does it mean? It certainly doesn’t mean what Bloomberg wrote about it yesterday:

In China, the invisible hand of the market sometimes needs help from the iron fist of the state. That’s certainly true after a meltdown vaporized $3.5 trillion in the value of shares traded on the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges.

The state caused the market to rocket 150% in a year by making cheap credit available to buy stocks in the first place. In addition, investors are rescuing their money from the collapsing real estate market. China has dozens of new ghost towns because for decades the state limited where citizens could invest their savings, leaving them with real estate as the only good option. Prices in real estate have been falling recently, so when the state opened stock exchanges much of the real estate money went into them.

At the same time, the state-controlled media urged individuals to buy into the market. Not only did the state contribute to the markets meteoric rise, it tied the reputation of its policies to market success, according to Bloomberg:

“This is a real testing moment for the leadership,” says Zhao Xijun, deputy dean of Renmin University’s School of Finance. “The evaporation of fortunes of more than 80 million individual investors would pose unthinkable social problems for the country.”

And while the market is $3.5 trillion lower than its peak, that doesn’t mean the economy is poorer by that amount. The stock market is a zero sum game. For every loser of a dollar someone has gained a dollar.

The recent rise and drop in China’s market is not very different from the US market in the late 1990s that enjoyed the dot.com bubble in which PE ratios lost their sanity and then went bust.

A stock market cannot climb 150% in a year without massive credit expansion by the state. But as Mises explained in Human Action, the money supply must grow at exponential rates in order to keep the bubble from collapsing. Chinese authorities probably didn’t know that, in spite of the popularity of Austrian economics at many Chinese universities.

Stock markets provide insight into the expectations of others about the future and help coordinate business plans, according to the great Austrian economist Ludwig Lachmann. A collapse like that seen in China lately shows that many business people are growing skeptical about the future of China’s economy.

China is primarily a consumer goods manufacturer in the international structure of capital, so if its economy is slowing it signals that exports of consumer goods to the US and Europe are falling. And if the US and Europe are buying fewer Chinese goods, that’s probably a sign that consumers in those markets are hurting. China’s market may be the snow flake that causes the avalanche in the stock markets of the US and Europe.

Assault on the Dollar

The US dollar’s position as the dominant reserve currency is coming under assault from at least three directions. The UN announced in 2009 plans to mint silver and gold coins to be used in international trade. Socialist economist Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate, chaired the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) said it shows

..a growing consensus that there are problems with the dollar reserve system. Developing countries are lending the United States trillions dollars at almost zero interest rates when they have huge needs themselves... It’s indicative of the nature of the problem. It’s a net transfer, in a sense, to the United States, a form of foreign aid.

Emerging market (EM) countries that hold large amounts of dollar reserves don’t hang onto hundred dollar bills. They use their cash to buy US government debt so that they can earn interest and that is what Stiglitz meant by EM countries lending to the US. When someone needs US dollars, to buy oil for example, the EM central bank can easily sell the US debt and provide the dollars for the exchange.

Armand Dufour of the European Bank welcomed the UN coins. “People have enough Fiat currency options, government and banks cannot intrude on bullion coins – they will have their own inviolable value... If we see a dismounting from the US dollar, as is inevitable in the main view, there will be a strong move to the Oro, which may drive its price up to the point where governments will not allow its circulation; they will try to isolate it.”

In his last statement he is merely echoing Gresham's law that bad money drives out good, meaning that people will hoard the UN money while spending paper money as fast as possible.

Then in a Free Market post, China Takes Aim at the US Dollar, Sean Brodrick reported that the Chinese government is pushing its yuan to be a reserve currency like the US dollar. Brodrick wrote, 

In early April, former Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers publicly warned: "This past month may be remembered as the moment the United States lost its role as the underwriter of the global economic system."

China’s crime was to launch the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), to compete with the Asian Investment Bank and World Bank, both led by the US. The US begged its “friends” not to join, but they did anyway. Also, China has initiated the China International Payment System (CIPS) in direct competition for the other international payment system called SWIFT, which is a key support of U.S. dollar hegemony.

Finally there is the BRIC bank in which Brazil, Russia, Italy and China teamed up to replace the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. According RT News,

The big launch of the BRICS bank is seen as a first step to break the dominance of the US dollar in global trade, as well as dollar-backed institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, both US-based institutions BRICS countries have little influence within.

Talking heads and bloggers typically respond to news of the dollar’s demise as a reserve currency with hysteria: the dollar will become worthless and hyperinflation will destroy the US economy. However, one of the most important economic lessons that investors need to learn is this:  fear sells. Every politician and media flunky knows this. To paraphrase the great American newspaper editor HL Mencken, politicians and media pundits devote their time to frightening people because people will vote or pay attention to the media only when frightened. 

For some reason known only to God people are not interested in good news. Years ago I read a paper in an advertising journal that described research on themes in advertising that actually work. Researchers tested love, sex, friendship and a dozen other themes in ads and discovered that none of the themes moved viewers except fear, and fear worked well.

Nevertheless, I will proceed with the contrarian view: ending US dollar hegemony will be good for the US in the long run, though it could be painful in the short. Keep in mind that a collapse of the value of the US dollar against other currencies will only affect the prices of imports and exports and imports aren’t a large part of the US GDP. So yes, there will be some inflation. But the value of the dollar for domestic goods won’t collapse. Ceteris parabus, more expensive imports will cause the prices of domestic goods to fall. The prices of both imports and domestic goods can rise at the same time only if the Fed cranks up its money printing machine.

So what is the great advantage that the US gets from its status as the number one reserve currency in the world, the loss of which strikes terror in the hearts of mainstream economists? The chief advantage is that the Fed can flood the world with US dollars and the federal government can borrow and spend far beyond its means with impunity. But is that really an advantage for US citizens? No, it is not! Fed money printing does enormous damage according to the Austrian business-cycle theory. The Fed’s ability to print infinite amounts of money is the single most destructive force in the US.

1. It transfers wealth from the poor and middle classes to the wealthy who work in the financial services industries because the latter get the new money first before prices have risen and the former get it last. 
2. It causes the booms and busts that hurt the middle and poor classes the most. 
3. It destroys manufacturing by eroding the value of funds set aside for depreciation, which makes replacing worn-out equipment harder, and reduces profits by forcing them to pay taxes on inflated dollars. 

Federal spending far beyond its means is not much better. The borrowing required to finance deficit spending causes the trade deficit and loss of US jobs (the reason would require another post) and burdens our children with unbearable debt. So why would any economist consider that being the dominant reserve currency is a benefit to the US? They do so because they’re socialists, like Stiglitz.

Because mainstream economists favor unlimited money printing by the Fed and unlimited deficits by the federal government, there is no one restraining either. Those of us who want a better future for our children have only one hope, that an outside force will come to our aid. Barring a miracle for God, China’s efforts to capture the “benefits” of reserve currency are our best hope.

Without reserve status, US citizens would have to buy gold or yuan in order to purchase imports, but a rapidly depreciating US dollar would make that difficult and force the Fed to show some restraint. Also, interest rates for borrowing by the federal government would rise and be denominated in yuan, so any depreciation of the US dollar would increase government debt by the same amount. That would add more pressure to the Fed to stop printing money.

In short, the US would find itself in a position similar to the PIIGS, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain after the Big EZ fiasco. None of the PIIGS could print their way out of their problems and the governments could not borrow, so they had to reduce regulations, cut spending and raise taxes to get their economies moving forward. Greece hasn’t been so good at it. Nothing would help the US economy more than similar medicine.

China's slow growth omen

Reading the daily economic news in hopes of navigating our location in the business cycle reminds me of ancient priests trying to discern the movements of the gods by examining the contours of the liver of a sacrificed goat. Even the ancients priests understood that the more omens they could combine the better their predictions would be.

Another omen appeared this week when China announced that official China Federation of Logistics’ January purchasing managers’ index (PMI) slid to 49.8 from 50.1. The HSBC and Markit private sector PMI also fell from 49.8 to 49.7. Indexes like these are designed so that any outcome below 50 indicates contraction in the sector. In the worldwide division of capital, China is primarily a consumer goods manufacturing nation that supplies the US and the Big EZ (Euro Zone), which are the world’s largest manufacturers of producer and capital goods.

The Austrian Business-Cycle Theory (ABCT) at its simplest divides economies into raw materials, producer goods and consumer goods. Hayek’s version, employing the Ricardo Effect, says the turning point in an expansion comes when spending on consumer goods increases and the greater profits cause consumer goods makers to stop buying new equipment. That generates a profit crisis among producers goods manufacturers who begin to reduce employment and the recessions begins. The large jump in GDP, which mostly measures sales of consumer goods, in the third quarter was an omen of bad things to come from the producer goods sector. Sales of consumer goods (GDP) fall when enough workers in the producer goods sectors have lost their jobs.