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THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW - Movember 16, 2009
US Must Solve Its Own Economic Problems
by: Mark Weisbrot
The Center for Economic and Policy Research
President Obama will go to Asia next week and has promised
to say something about the exchange rate between the
Chinese yuan and the U.S. dollar. It would be good if some
enterprising journalist asked him why the United States is
worried about the Chinese dumping their dollars, and why
U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner recently said that
the United States is committed to a "strong dollar." As a
matter of accounting, a "strong dollar" is the same as an
"undervalued yuan." So it makes no sense to be worried
about the great "power" that the Chinese are holding over
us -- that they can dump a few hundred billion dollars of
their reserve holdings and cause the dollar to fall.
A fall in the dollar would be just what Obama and others
are asking for when they ask the Chinese to allow their
own currency to rise. This would stimulate the U.S.
economy by reducing our trade deficit. It is also just
what we need to resolve the long-term problem that our
trade deficit represents. Although the U.S. trade deficit
has been cut in half during the current recession, it will
once again swell as the economy recovers unless the dollar
is reduced to a more competitive level and stays there.
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The manufacturing sector of the United States, including
the National Association of Manufacturers and some union
leaders, understand this very well. But they have relative-
ly little political clout. The interests that dominate
economic policy-making in the United States are mainly in
the financial sector, as we can see by the hundreds of
billions of dollars of no-strings-attached government sub-
sidies they have gotten in this recession; and the $21
billion in executive compensation that will be paid out by
Goldman-Sachs, which is particularly well represented in
our government. A strong dollar is good for them because
it makes anything they want to buy overseas cheaper, and
of course it lowers inflation by keeping imports cheaper.
The more than five million manufacturing jobs lost over
the last decade are just "collateral damage" for them.
Since this conflict of interest between Wall Street and
the rest of the country has been resolved in favor of
the guys with the big bonuses, what we end up with is a
spectacle of scapegoating. It is cheap and easy to blame
the Chinese for the overvalued U.S. dollar (which is
official U.S. policy) and the U.S. trade deficit. While
it is true that the Chinese could allow their currency
to rise against the dollar, it is also true that the
United States Treasury has the ability to influence the
international value of our own currency - just like China
and many other countries do. Although the Chinese currency
is not freely convertible, our government could push down
the dollar against other major currencies, which would
generate more pressure on the Chinese currency. It is
also worth noting, as World Bank Chief Economist Lin Yifu
pointed out this week, that only about one-third of the
U.S. trade deficit for the years 1990-2007 is with China.
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With respect to the Chinese holdings of dollar-denominated
assets, China is holding a lot of longer-term U.S. govern-
ment bonds (e.g. U.S. ten-year treasuries). If the Chinese
government were to sell off a lot of these, it would drive
up long-term interest rates in the U.S. Since our mortgage
rates and other long-term lending rates tend to move with
long-term Treasuries, this could obviously have a negative
impact on the U.S. economy.
But it must be emphasized that this is a different issue
from the dollar falling. Is this threat of a Chinese sell-
off of longer-term U.S. treasuries something that we should
worry about? Not really. First, the Chinese government does
not want to hurt the U.S. economy, which still absorbs
about 20 percent of Chinese exports. One reason that they
have accumulated long-term Treasuries was to help push down
long-term rates in the U.S., to support growth and demand
for their exports during the 2001-2007 expansion in the
U.S. (Some economists have even tried to blame the Chinese
for the housing bubble, since these purchases helped push
mortgage rates down during the bubble years. But the
housing bubble was, even more than the overvalued dollar,
a result of deliberate U.S. policy.) Second, the Fed can
counter-act unwanted increases in long-term treasury and
mortgage rates, as it has already done during this
recession.
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Deficit hawks and other fear-mongers in the U.S. have also
used the Chinese accumulation of U.S. debt as another
weapon to try and persuade people that we must sacrifice
growth and employment during a deep recession, in order to
avoid further debt accumulation. This too, is a dangerous
misconception. Unfortunately our economic problems are made
in the United States, and it is here in Washington that
they will need to be fixed.
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