Bernanke Is Right About China

 

 

 I can understand China wanting to make its currency a reserve currency.  Yet this must mean a completely free tradability or just why would anyone settle in the stuff.  That is the issue.  In the meantime the USA has flooded the world with US currency to the extent that everyone has a goodly supply and it really is the true global currency.  And yes, the USA has benefited wonderfully from this arrangement.

Unfortunately, the other shoe has yet to drop yet.  It is that the USA is now rotating over to a positive balance of payments.  Add in the expected here subsidence of the whole oil industry beginning mostly in North America and you have a wonderful situation in which the US dollar becomes progressively more valuable even if they never learn to operate things a lot better.

 

Plenty of other aspects of the China situation is as troublsome as anything happening in the West.  As all this slowly hits home, we can expect an expansion of Chinese humility similar to recent Japanese humility and their unwelcome need to rearm.

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Bernanke Is Right About China

By Valentin Schmid, Epoch Times | May 25, 2015

 http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1369063-bernanke-is-right-about-china/

Since leaving the Federal Reserve, its former chairman Benjamin Bernanke has been busy making money. He recently became an advisor for Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel and rumor has it he makes $200,000 for every public speech he gives.

We don’t know whether Fudan University paid as much during his appearance at its Shanghai Forum, but his candid talk certainly would have been worth the money, although a bit behind the curve.

“China needs to avoid currency mismatch as it opens its capital account,” Bernanke said on Monday. “For a currency to be internationally traded, what you need most is liquid markets. A deep market means people can get their money out.”

And people are getting their money out in droves. Gone are the times when people incessantly complained about the Chinese currency being undervalued. Now even Bernanke says it might drop in value.

“When opening the capital account you need to make sure the economy is strong enough to handle the fund flows out,” Bernanke said.

Since its policy of reforms and opening up, China actually kept its capital account closed. If you trade goods and services, you can deal with foreign curreny—which you then have to surrender to the central bank—but ordinary citizens still face limits on how much money they can invest abroad.

Of course, these restrictions didn’t stop them and they kept funneling money out of the country illegally by the trillions.

Conversely, foreigners cannot just open a bank account and wire money to China. So far investment has been tightly regulated and restricted as well. All this means that the bulk of foreign exchange has accumulated on the balance sheet of the central bank, rather than in the hand of private firms and individuals.   

On the other hand, the bulk of yuan is held by Chinese citizens, mostly in the form of bank deposits. Bernanke and many other market observers have long criticized there aren’t any capital markets to speak of because the country’s capital allocation is run by the Chinese state-owned banks.

As soon as Chinese become dissatisfied with the investment choices they have on domestic markets (real estate, bank deposits, wealth management products, and the stock market), more money is going out.

For the moment, China is opening up bit by bit and also propping up its currency because it wants to look good in front of the International Monetary Fund. They will give China the chance to join its international reserve currency. And for that, they need both stability and flexibility.