China is not alone in facing a dilemma as deflation spreads and beggar-thy-neighbour currency wars become the norm
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
9:44PM GMT 04 Feb 2015
China is trapped. The Communist authorities have discovered, like the Japanese in the early 1990s and the US in the inter-war years, that they cannot deflate a credit bubble safely.
A year of tight money from the People's Bank and a $250bn crackdown on shadow banking have pushed the Chinese economy close to a debt-deflation crisis.
Wednesday's surprise cut in the Reserve Requirement Ratio (RRR) - the main policy tool - comes in the nick of time. Factory gate deflation has reached -3.3pc. The official gauge of manufacturing fell below the "boom-bust" line to 49.8 in January.
Haibin Zhu, from JP Morgan, says the 50-point cut in the RRR from 20pc to 19.5pc injects roughly $100bn into the system.
This will not, in itself, change anything. The average one-year borrowing cost for Chinese companies has risen from zero to 5pc in real terms over the past three years as a result of falling inflation. UBS said the debt-servicing burden for these firms has doubled from 7.5pc to 15pc of GDP.
Yet the cut marks an inflection point. There will undoubtedly be a long series of cuts before China sweats out its hangover from a $26 trillion credit boom. Debt has risen from 100pc to 250pc of GDP in eight years. By comparison, Japan's credit growth in the cycle preceding its Lost Decade was 50pc of GDP.
The People's Bank may have to cut all the way to zero in the end - a $4 trillion reserve of emergency oxygen - but to do that is to play the last card.
Wednesday's trigger was an amber warning sign in the jobs market. The employment component of the manufacturing survey contracted for the 15th month. Premier Li Keqiang targets jobs - not growth - and the labour market is looking faintly ominous for the first time.
Unemployment is supposed to be 4.1pc, a make-believe figure. A joint study by the International Monetary Fund and the International Labour Federation said it is really 6.3pc, high enough to cause sleepless nights for a one-party regime that depends on ever-rising prosperity to replace the lost elan of revolutionary Maoism.
Whether or not you call it a hard-landing, China is struggling. Home prices fell 4.3pc in December. New floor space started has slumped 30pc on a three-month basis. This packs a macro-economic punch.
A study by Jun Nie and Guangye Cao for the US Federal Reserve said that since 1998 property investment in China has risen from 4pc to 15pc of GDP, the same level as in Spain at the peak of the "burbuja". The inventory overhang has risen to 18 months compared with 5.8 in the US.
The property slump is turning into a fiscal squeeze since land sales make up 25pc of local government money. Zhiwei Zhang, from Deutsche Bank, says land revenues crashed 21pc in the fourth quarter of last year. "The decline of fiscal revenue is the top risk in China and will lead to a sharp slowdown," he said.
The IMF says China's fiscal deficit is nearly 10pc of GDP once land sales are stripped out and all spending included, far higher than generally supposed. It warned two years ago that Beijing was running out of room and could ultimately face "a severe credit crunch".
The gears are shifting across the Chinese policy spectrum. Shanghai Securities News reported that 14 Chinese provinces are preparing a $2.4 trillion blitz on infrastructure to combat the downturn, a reversion to the same policies of reflexive stimulus that President Xi Jinping forswore in his Third Plenum reforms.
How much of this is new money remains to be seen but there is no doubt that Beijing is blinking. It may be right to do so - given the choice of poisons - yet such a course stores up even greater problems for the future. The China Development Research Council, Li Keqiang's brain-trust, has been shouting from the rooftops that the country must take its post-debt punishment "as soon possible".
China is not alone in facing this dilemma as deflation spreads and beggar-thy-neighbour currency wars become the norm. Fifteen central banks have eased monetary policy so far this year.
Denmark's National Bank has cut rates three times in two weeks to -0.5pc in an effort to defend its euro-peg, the latest casualty of the European Central Bank's €1.1 trillion quantitative easing. The Swiss central bank has been blown away.
Asia is already in a currency cauldron, eerily like the onset of the 1998 crisis. The Japanese yen has fallen by half against the Chinese yuan since Abenomics burst upon the Pacific Rim. Japanese exporters pocketed the windfall gains of devaluation at first to boost margins. Now they are cutting prices to gain export share, exporting deflation.
China's yuan is loosely pegged to a rocketing US dollar. Its trade-weighted exchange rate has jumped 10pc since July. This is eroding the wafer-thin profit margins of Chinese companies and tightening monetary conditions into the downturn.
David Woo, from Bank of America, says Beijing may be forced to join the currency wars to defend itself, even though this variant of the "Prisoner's Dilemma" leaves everybody worse off.
"We view a meaningful yuan devaluation as a major tail-risk for the global economy," said.
If this were to happen, it would send a deflationary impulse worldwide. China spent $5 trillion on fixed investment last year, more than Europe and America combined, increasing its overcapacity in everything from shipping to steels, chemicals and solar panels, to even more unmanageable levels.
A yuan devaluation would dump this on everybody else. It would come at a moment when Europe is already in deflation at -0.6pc, and when Britain and the US are fast exhausting their inflation buffers as well.
Such a shock would be extremely hard to combat. Interest rates are already zero across the developed world. Five-year bond yields are negative in six European countries. The 10-year Bund has dropped to 0.31. These are no longer just 14th century lows. They are unprecedented.
My own guess is that we would have to tear up the script and start printing money to build roads, pay salaries and fund a vast New Deal. This form of helicopter money, or "fiscal dominance", may be dangerous, but not nearly as dangerous as the alternative.
China faces a Morton's Fork. Li Keqiang has made it his life's mission to stop his country drifting into the middle income trap. He says himself that the investment-led model of past 30 years is obsolete. The low-hanging fruit of catch-up growth has been picked.
For two years he has been trying to tame the state's industrial behemoths, and trying to wean the economy off credit. Yet virtuous intent has run into cold reality. It cannot be done. China passed the point of no return five years ago.
Yet the cut marks an inflection point. There will undoubtedly be a long series of cuts before China sweats out its hangover from a $26 trillion credit boom. Debt has risen from 100pc to 250pc of GDP in eight years. By comparison, Japan's credit growth in the cycle preceding its Lost Decade was 50pc of GDP.
The People's Bank may have to cut all the way to zero in the end - a $4 trillion reserve of emergency oxygen - but to do that is to play the last card.
Wednesday's trigger was an amber warning sign in the jobs market. The employment component of the manufacturing survey contracted for the 15th month. Premier Li Keqiang targets jobs - not growth - and the labour market is looking faintly ominous for the first time.
Unemployment is supposed to be 4.1pc, a make-believe figure. A joint study by the International Monetary Fund and the International Labour Federation said it is really 6.3pc, high enough to cause sleepless nights for a one-party regime that depends on ever-rising prosperity to replace the lost elan of revolutionary Maoism.
Whether or not you call it a hard-landing, China is struggling. Home prices fell 4.3pc in December. New floor space started has slumped 30pc on a three-month basis. This packs a macro-economic punch.
A study by Jun Nie and Guangye Cao for the US Federal Reserve said that since 1998 property investment in China has risen from 4pc to 15pc of GDP, the same level as in Spain at the peak of the "burbuja". The inventory overhang has risen to 18 months compared with 5.8 in the US.
The property slump is turning into a fiscal squeeze since land sales make up 25pc of local government money. Zhiwei Zhang, from Deutsche Bank, says land revenues crashed 21pc in the fourth quarter of last year. "The decline of fiscal revenue is the top risk in China and will lead to a sharp slowdown," he said.
The IMF says China's fiscal deficit is nearly 10pc of GDP once land sales are stripped out and all spending included, far higher than generally supposed. It warned two years ago that Beijing was running out of room and could ultimately face "a severe credit crunch".
The gears are shifting across the Chinese policy spectrum. Shanghai Securities News reported that 14 Chinese provinces are preparing a $2.4 trillion blitz on infrastructure to combat the downturn, a reversion to the same policies of reflexive stimulus that President Xi Jinping forswore in his Third Plenum reforms.
How much of this is new money remains to be seen but there is no doubt that Beijing is blinking. It may be right to do so - given the choice of poisons - yet such a course stores up even greater problems for the future. The China Development Research Council, Li Keqiang's brain-trust, has been shouting from the rooftops that the country must take its post-debt punishment "as soon possible".
China is not alone in facing this dilemma as deflation spreads and beggar-thy-neighbour currency wars become the norm. Fifteen central banks have eased monetary policy so far this year.
Denmark's National Bank has cut rates three times in two weeks to -0.5pc in an effort to defend its euro-peg, the latest casualty of the European Central Bank's €1.1 trillion quantitative easing. The Swiss central bank has been blown away.
Asia is already in a currency cauldron, eerily like the onset of the 1998 crisis. The Japanese yen has fallen by half against the Chinese yuan since Abenomics burst upon the Pacific Rim. Japanese exporters pocketed the windfall gains of devaluation at first to boost margins. Now they are cutting prices to gain export share, exporting deflation.
China's yuan is loosely pegged to a rocketing US dollar. Its trade-weighted exchange rate has jumped 10pc since July. This is eroding the wafer-thin profit margins of Chinese companies and tightening monetary conditions into the downturn.
David Woo, from Bank of America, says Beijing may be forced to join the currency wars to defend itself, even though this variant of the "Prisoner's Dilemma" leaves everybody worse off.
"We view a meaningful yuan devaluation as a major tail-risk for the global economy," said.
If this were to happen, it would send a deflationary impulse worldwide. China spent $5 trillion on fixed investment last year, more than Europe and America combined, increasing its overcapacity in everything from shipping to steels, chemicals and solar panels, to even more unmanageable levels.
A yuan devaluation would dump this on everybody else. It would come at a moment when Europe is already in deflation at -0.6pc, and when Britain and the US are fast exhausting their inflation buffers as well.
Such a shock would be extremely hard to combat. Interest rates are already zero across the developed world. Five-year bond yields are negative in six European countries. The 10-year Bund has dropped to 0.31. These are no longer just 14th century lows. They are unprecedented.
My own guess is that we would have to tear up the script and start printing money to build roads, pay salaries and fund a vast New Deal. This form of helicopter money, or "fiscal dominance", may be dangerous, but not nearly as dangerous as the alternative.
China faces a Morton's Fork. Li Keqiang has made it his life's mission to stop his country drifting into the middle income trap. He says himself that the investment-led model of past 30 years is obsolete. The low-hanging fruit of catch-up growth has been picked.
For two years he has been trying to tame the state's industrial behemoths, and trying to wean the economy off credit. Yet virtuous intent has run into cold reality. It cannot be done. China passed the point of no return five years ago.
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