其次，私人部门正在朝这个方向运转。华盛顿国际金融研究所(Institute for International Finance)在4月份的预测中指出，今年净流入新兴国家的外来私人资金将达到7460亿美元（见图表）。这些新兴国家净流出的私人资金为5660亿美元，能够部分抵消上述流入。尽管如此，由于新兴国家还有着3200亿美元的经常账户盈余以及适度的官方资金流入，在没有政府干涉的情况下，新兴国家仍将实现5350亿美元的外部收支盈余。但若不加干涉，这种情况也不可能发生：经常账户必须平衡资本净流动。调整将通过提高汇率进行。最终，新兴国家将出现经常账户赤字，来自高收入国家的私人资金净流入，将为这种赤字买单。事实上，这正是我们所期待发生的。
在人类历史上，从来没有一个超级大国的政府，会借给另一个超级大国这么多钱。一些人辩称，这种汇率管理方式不是操纵（与美国国会的观点相左），因为调整可以通过“国内成本与价格的变动”进行。周二出版的英国《金融时报》上，就刊登了美国西部信托公司(Trust Company of the West)科玛尔•斯里库-马尔(Komal Sri-Kumar)的类似观点。如果不是因为中国下了力气、并成功遏制了其干预行为自然会导致的货币及通胀影响，那么，这种论点会更具说服力。与此同时，新兴国家向着经常账户赤字方向、不可避免的调整，正转移至那些对资金流入具有吸引力、同时又不愿（或无力）对外汇市场实施必要规模干预的国家。可怜的巴西！甚至，我们可能正目睹又一场新兴市场金融危机的发令枪响起？
译者/何黎 ****************************** Currency wars in an era of chronically weak demand
“We’re in the midst of an international currency war, a general weakening of currency. This threatens us because it takes away our competitiveness.” This complaint by Guido Mantega, Brazil’s finance minister, is entirely understandable. In an era of deficient demand, issuers of reserve currencies adopt monetary expansion and non-issuers respond with currency intervention. Those, like Brazil, who are not among the former and prefer not to copy the latter, find their currencies soaring. They fear the results.
This is not the first time for such currency conflicts. In September 1985, now 25 years ago, the governments of France, West Germany, Japan, the US and the UK met at the Plaza Hotel in New York and agreed to push for depreciation of the US dollar. Earlier still, in August 1971, the US president Richard Nixon imposed the “Nixon shock”, imposing a 10 per cent import surcharge and ending dollar convertibility into gold. Both events reflected the US desire to depreciate the dollar. It has the same desire today. But this time is different: the focus of attention is not a compliant ally, such as Japan, but the world’s next superpower: China. When such elephants fight, bystanders are likely to be trampled.
Here there are three facts, relevant to today’s currency wars.
First, as a result of the crisis, the developed world is suffering from chronically deficient demand. In none of the six biggest high-income economies – the US, Japan, Germany, France, the UK and Italy – was gross domestic product in the second quarter of this year back to where it was in the first quarter of 2008. These economies are now operating at up to 10 per cent below their past trends. One indication of the excess supply is the decline in core inflation to close to 1 per cent in the US and the eurozone: deflation beckons. These countries hope for export-led growth. This is true both of those with trade deficits (such as the US) and of those with surpluses (such as Germany and Japan). In aggregate, however, this can only happen if emerging economies shift towards current account deficit.
Second, private sectors are working in just this direction. In its April forecasts (soon to be updated), the Washington-based Institute for International Finance suggested that this year the net flow of external private finance into the emerging countries would be $746bn (see chart). This would be partially offset by a net private outflow from these countries of $566bn. Nevertheless, with a current account surplus of $320bn as well, and modest official capital inflows, the external balance of the emerging world, without official intervention, would be a surplus of $535bn. But, without the intervention, that could not happen: the current account must balance the net capital flow. The adjustment would go via a higher exchange rate. In the end, the emerging world would run a current account deficit financed by a net inflow of private capital from the high-income countries. Indeed, that is precisely what one would expect to happen.
Third, this natural adjustment continues to be thwarted by the build-up of foreign currency reserves,. These sums represent an official capital outflow (see chart). Between January 1999 and July 2008, the world’s official reserves rose from $1,615bn to $7,534bn – a staggering increase of $5,918bn. This increase was, one might argue, a form of self-insurance after earlier crises. Indeed, reserves were used up during this crisis: they shrank by $472bn between July 2008 and February 2009. No doubt, this helped countries without reserve currencies cushion the impact. But this use of reserves was a mere 6 per cent of the pre-crisis level. Moreover, between February 2009 and May 2010, reserves rose by another $1,324bn, to reach close to $8,385bn. Mercantilism lives!
China is overwhelmingly the dominant intervener, accounting for 40 per cent of the accumulation since February 2009. By June 2010, its reserves had reached $2,450bn, 30 per cent of the world total and a staggering 50 per cent of its own GDP. This accumulation must be viewed as a huge export subsidy.
Never in human history can the government of one superpower have lent so much to that of another. Some argue – Komal Sri-Kumar of the Trust Company of the West, in Tuesday’s Financial Times, for example – that such management of the exchange rate is not manipulative, contrary to views in the US Congress, since adjustment can occur via “changes in domestic costs and prices”. This argument would be more convincing if China had not worked hard and successfully to suppress the natural monetary and so inflationary consequences of its intervention. In the meantime, the inevitable adjustment towards current account deficits in the emerging world is being shifted on to countries that are both attractive to capital inflows and unwilling or unable to intervene in the currency markets on the needed scale. Poor Brazil! Could we even be seeing the starting gun for the next emerging market financial crisis?
John Connally, Nixon’s secretary of the Treasury, famously told the Europeans that the dollar “is our currency, but your problem”. The Chinese respond in kind. In the absence of currency adjustments, we are seeing a form of monetary warfare: in effect, the US is seeking to inflate China, and China to deflate the US. Both sides are convinced they are right; neither is succeeding; and the rest of the world suffers.
It is not hard to see China’s point of view: it is desperate to avoid what it views as the dire fate of Japan after the Plaza accord. With export competitiveness damaged by its soaring currency and pressured by the US to reduce its current account surplus, Japan chose not the needed structural reforms, but a huge monetary expansion, instead. The consequent bubble helped deliver the “lost decade” of the 1990s. Once a world-beater, Japan fell into the doldrums. For China, self-evidently, any such outcome would be a catastrophe. At the same time, it is difficult to envisage a robust configuration of the world economy without large net capital flows from the high-income countries to the rest. Yet it is also hard to imagine that happening, on a sustainable basis, if the world’s biggest and most successful emerging economy is also its largest net exporter of capital.
What is needed is a route to these needed global adjustments. That will demand not just a will to co-operate that now seems sorely lacking, but greater imagination about both domestic and international reforms. I would like to be optimistic. But I am not: a world of beggar-my-neighbour policy is most unlikely to end well.
時間回到清末，慈禧太后坐擁大權，統治中國。庚子事變「扶清滅洋」後，慈禧在西方報刊漫畫中被醜化為殘忍的老暴君，又適逢中國官方首度受邀參加1904年在美國舉辦的聖路易斯世博會，美國大使康格的夫人莎拉．派克．康格（Sarah Pike Conger）於是建議太后畫像，以正視聽，扭轉印象。1903年美國女畫家凱瑟琳．卡爾（Katharine Augusta Carl）受邀入頤和園為慈禧畫像，她說：「若非我知道她已年近六十九，我會以為他是保養得宜的四十歲婦女。寡婦之身的她並不用化妝品，臉上浮現自然健康的光澤。」她為慈禧畫成四幅畫作，只有兩幅存世，一幅在北京頤和園，一幅就是史博館正在展出的〈慈禧太后畫像〉。
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