Obama in China: Breaking the exchange-rate deadlock

US president Obama leaves next week for a high-profile trip that includes meetings with other “Asia-Pacific” countries (in the APEC forum) and a visit to China. The president has had considerable diplomatic success on the economic front to date, including at the Group of 20 summit meeting in April and — to a lesser degree — at the follow-up September summit meeting in Pittsburgh.

But the issues facing him now in Asia are particularly difficult, primarily because of China’s exchange-rate policy.

China essentially pegs its currency (the renminbi, also known as the yuan) against the American dollar, which means that it rises and — most recently — falls in tandem with the greenback.

Many countries operate de facto pegs of this nature, but China is problematic for three reasons:
It is a large economy (10% of world output, if we adjust for purchasing power)

It runs a big current-account surplus (exporting more to the world than it buys from the world, in the range of 6-12% of the Chinese economy).

It consistently has a bilateral surplus with the US that is galling to many on both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill (and to their constituents).

The political backlash is not without foundation. Jobs have moved and continue to move to China in part because Beijing’s exchange-rate policy gives Chinese exporters an unfair trade advantage. This has long been recognised and China committed as long ago as 2003 to address this issue, but the Bush administration was unable to achieve any lasting success on this front —- despite repeated head-to-head talks at the cabinet secretary level.

The Chinese currency remains at least 20% undervalued, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics (disclosure: I have a part-time position at the institute but don’t work on this calculation). Quietly, American officials do not disagree with such numbers. As a result, China continues to accumulate foreign-exchange reserves at a dramatic rate: It reached $2 trillion earlier this year and will most likely have $3 trillion around the middle of 2010 (i.e., equivalent to 20% of  US gross domestic product, a huge number).

The Bush administration, quite reasonably, tried to give the job of handling China’s exchange rate to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), beefing up its long-established mandate in this area. Unfortunately, the IMF has proved unable to make any significant progress, largely because it lacks the legitimacy necessary to wield any kind of stick on the issue. The Chinese just continue to say “no,” politely, and the IMF has backed down.
This is embarrassing for Obama, particularly as his strategy at the G-20 has been to play up the importance of “global imbalances,” which implies that over the next 12 months, the focus will be on reducing both the Chinese current-account surplus and the United States current-account deficit.

What should he say both to China and to its neighbours —- who also increasingly find China’s exchange-rate policy worrying, particularly as the dollar faces pressure to decline?

Obama needs to find a carrot and at least the shadow of a stick, but he really does not want to go anywhere near a trade war (remember the tit-for-tat protectionism of the Great Depression).

A compelling argument is actually hiding in plain sight.

As a result of easy monetary policy in the United States, combined with the rapid rebound of the Chinese economy, China now faces record capital inflows. These inflows are greatly encouraged by the inevitable prospect (in the minds of investors) that the renminbi will rise in value against the dollar within the foreseeable future. If you have access to cheap financing and implicit American government guarantees — as does Goldman Sachs, for example —- borrowing in dollars and investing (e.g., through private equity deals) in renminbi looks like a one-way bet.

The longer China resists appreciation and the more it protests that no one should interfere with this aspect of its sovereignty, the more the capital will pour in. This can have beneficial aspects in any country that is trying to grow fast, but it can also be profoundly destabilising.

Obama should talk gently about the experience of Japan in the 1980s, the United States this decade, and almost all emerging markets pretty much every decade.
Talking in public about big sticks never goes down well in Asia, and the administration should deny any inclination in this direction. But the mainstream consensus is starting to shift toward the idea that the World Trade Organisation (WTO), not the IMF, should have jurisdiction over exchange rates. The WTO has much more legitimacy, primarily because smaller and poorer countries can bring and win cases against the United States and Western Europe in that forum. It also has agreed upon and proven tools for dealing with violations of acceptable trade practices; tailored trade sanctions are permitted.
No one wants to take precipitate action in this direction, but extending the WTO’s mandate in the direction of exchange rates would take time — and presumably warrant discussion at the G-20 level. The United States has great influence over the G-20 agenda, and Obama’s staff members should hint, ever so gently, that this is where they see the process going. NYT

(Simon Johnson, a professor of entrepreneurship at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, is the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund)