China says NO to Yuan revaluation

[oboe]

I wonder if someday the Chinese will be talking about kicking the US out of the WTO?

It'd be really interesting to know how Reagan would've handled trade with the Chinese - I mean the situations we are confronting nowadays.

He was pretty tough on the Japanese, and we've got Nissan, Toyota, and Honda plants in the US to prove it.   He seemed like a stickler for "fair" trade practices.

[Momus--]

Originally posted by NUKE
Hey, that's what liberal dreamers like Carter and Clinton do best.

 

Wasn't it a rebublican controlled congress that endorsed china's move to MFN status?

[Maverick]

China has a very good reason to maintain their currency at it's present level. They are trying to buy Unocal at what 18.5 billion? If they devalued their currency it would cost them that much more. The best timing for them would be to devalue it after the sale.

[lazs2]

5- Flamebaiting, trolling, or posting to incite or annoy is not allowed.

[Thrawn]

Originally posted by Maverick
China has a very good reason to maintain their currency at it's present level. They are trying to buy Unocal at what 18.5 billion? If they devalued their currency it would cost them that much more. The best timing for them would be to devalue it after the sale.

I think maybe you should look at it more long term, in a longer historical context and at a greater scale.

China got enough UDS in the first five weeks of this year alone, due to the US's trade deficit with it, to buy Unocal.  That is ignoring the several hundreds of billions of USDs they have in reserve.

http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5700.html

I notice the fact that China is also buying Maytag has gone under the radar.  China is going to keep the Yuan pinned to the USD as long as there is stuff for them to buy in the US, or the US starts nationalising it's industries.  Then do switch to the Euro and do the same thing to the Europeans.

[-dead-]

Originally posted by Maverick
China has a very good reason to maintain their currency at it's present level. They are trying to buy Unocal at what 18.5 billion? If they devalued their currency it would cost them that much more. The best timing for them would be to devalue it after the sale.

It goes beyond Unocal - the problem is they have no real pressing need to devalue. Here's what the old head of HSBC had to say about it:

He said he supports China's position that it will not adjust the yuan peg until it sees the need to do so

"I think that has to be the absolutely right thing to do," he said. "For there to be a revaluation, there has to be a compelling case for a revaluation. And I am not convinced today that there is a compelling reason." Eldon said there may be some trade imbalances China has with one or two countries, including the US, but on a multilateral basis, its external accounts are "not considerably out of balance." "The amount of goods that China exports, a large component of those goods are actually imported so I am not quite sure who the revaluation will benefit," he added. A high-inflation environment that could make a case for revaluation is also not present in China

"The inflation rate in China is not that high," Eldon said

The new head of HSBC points out that even if the PRC did devalue, it won't help out the US that much:

Stuart T. Gulliver, chief executive of corporate investment banking and markets at HSBC, said the United States has a number of economic problems itself, including a massive current account deficit and a low savings rate, a re-evaluation of the RMB would not be enough to solve the US trade problem.

"US trade with China represents only 10 percent of its total trade. If China was to revaluate its currency, hypothetically by 25 percent, it would only improve the US dollar on a trade- weighted basis by about 2.5 percent -- not enough to solve the US trade problem," he said.

[MrCoffee]

the US wants china and india to grow. They want then to grow into large markets. especially china with its large population would be a subtantial new market.

[Vulcan]

Deleted.

See rule #5.

[oboe]

Originally posted by MrCoffee
the US wants china and india to grow. They want then to grow into large markets. especially china with its large population would be a subtantial new market.

Markets for what?   Our Goods and Services?    We're losing our manufacturing base to the Chinese and losing our service sector jobs to India.   By the time their markets are fully developed, I'm not sure we'll offer any substantial goods and services.

One way to retain our capacity is to reduce our costs (which are mostly labor).    If our manufacturing and service sector jobs were to take a 90% cut in pay, the incentive to move jobs offshore would be drastically reduced.  And our manufacturers would greatly benefit by a repeal of all environmental protection laws.   Finally, we need to remove onerous burdens like the accounting rules and restrictions imposed by Sarbanes-Oxley.

[Vulcan]

Oi MP's, I have a legitimate point. America is hypocritical, it misbehaves in the WTO... so when the WTO bully finds a bigger bully on the block I think its funny.

[Khyron]

(sorry if this for some reason get's multiple postings, this system's submission procedure is a bit confusing to me -- kept giving me a not registered message and then having me re-register to post)

I believe the SaburoS reference to Nixon was because Nixon was the one that dropped the Republic of China and recognized the People's Republic of China.

MFN status seems mostly a misnomer to me.  It really is more a "Nation Not Under Trade Sanctions" status (I forgot, Section 11 sanctions or something like that), rather than a true Most Favored Nation -- you're really not more favored than anyone other than the few countries here and there we are having a little spat with.  This is a big reason why there is no longer MFN status, rather it is now the NTR status today (since 1998? 99?) -- standing for Normal Trade Relations.  This is much clearer as to what that status is under the WTO/GATT/TRIPS legislations.

I believe the concept of the WTO is primarily to reduce the national barriers to trade.  Not allowing a market as large as China's into the WTO, especially with the amount of trade between the US and the PRC, would be detrimental to the US.  I believe this to be so because there is some semblance to rules/requirements and some forum for disputes with the PRC in the WTO as opposed to not.  Otherwise the US and the PRC would be back to a more wild, wide-ranging tit for tat spats in trade, especially in a market the US is eager to get into.

As for the the perceived US hypocracy -- trade barriers seemed to always have been about protectionism and the whole concept of the WTO is hypocracy in my opinion then.  But then again I've never really held dear to my hear the concept of international laws anyway.  Seems as long as there is no world sovereign, there really is no international law, and any such international law is hypocracy itself.  What I mean by this is that agreements are agreements, and that's all IL's are to me as they don't really have any of the usual earmarks of what a law is.  Heck, to an American at least, just about all international laws would fail for vague and indefiniteness, if they had to pass traditional US legal analysis.  Not that I am saying that IL's must pass US-centric views, other than to whatever extent it should be afforded to any other consensus giving civilized nation, or whatever the current maxim is today.

As for valuations of the Yuan/Renmebei, I believe the US is very interested beyond simple trade of some appliances sold back and forth, here and there.  Given that the PRC has been buying up so much of US notes and debt, the effect of the PRC on the US economy goes beyond simple trade, despite what HSBC or John Kerry may  believe or wish to admit to.  I believe this may be driving much more of the US interest in PRC economic policy.  I also believe much of the gobbledegook coming out of the popular media and from the politicians' mouth is just platitudes for the masses to gain a quick buck or a quick vote.

However, more in line with what that HSBC quote may have been getting at -- a disturbing observation:  When the PRC tends to buy things, it tends to be able to back its purchases in hard values (such as gold), whereas the US seems increasingly backed merely by the good faith in the US economy which increasingly seems to be more hot air, relative to before, as the savings decline.

As an aside/tangent, this is more what's bothering me of late.  The popular trend of savings (and spending) vs. recent US legislation in the bankruptcy code looks to me to be a recipe for long term disaster when you couple this with what many believe to be an impending correction in real property values.   (Sorry, I don't mean to swap topics)  The great Asian economic collapse of 5-10 years ago seems to be due to this same phenomina in large part.  I believe if many get financially wiped out by this here in the US, the few system cheaters caught and the few banking industry's dollars saved by the bankruptcy reformation will not have been worth it.  (fill in usual requisite comparisons to 1920's and 30's crashes here).