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中国的美元陷阱简介
PAUL KRUGMAN是2008年诺贝尔经济学奖获得者，现为普林斯顿大学经济学与国际事务教授。
其对中国巨额外汇储备的分析，令人深思，使人警醒。
Back in the early stages of the financial crisis, wags joked that our trade with China had turned out to be fair and balanced after all: They sold us poison toys and tainted seafood; we sold them fraudulent securities.
But these days, both sides of that deal are breaking down. On one side, the world’s appetite for Chinese goods has fallen off sharply. China’s exports have plunged in recent months and are now down 26 percent from a year ago. On the other side, the Chinese are evidently getting anxious about those securities.
But China still seems to have unrealistic expectations. And that’s a problem for all of us.
The big news last week was a speech by Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of China’s central bank, calling for a new “super-sovereign reserve currency.”
The paranoid wing of the Republican Party promptly warned of a dastardly plot to make America give up the dollar. But Mr. Zhou’s speech was actually an admission of weakness. In effect, he was saying that China had driven itself into a dollar trap, and that it can neither get itself out nor change the policies that put it in that trap in the first place.
Some background: In the early years of this decade, China began running large trade surpluses and also began attracting substantial inflows of foreign capital. If China had had a floating exchange rate — like, say, Canada — this would have led to a rise in the value of its currency, which, in turn, would have slowed the growth of China’s exports.
But China chose instead to keep the value of the yuan in terms of the dollar more or less fixed. To do this, it had to buy up dollars as they came flooding in. As the years went by, those trade surpluses just kept growing — and so did China’s hoard of foreign assets.
Now the joke about fraudulent securities was actually unfair. Aside from a late, ill-considered plunge into equities (at the very top of the market), the Chinese mainly accumulated very safe assets, with U.S. Treasury bills — T-bills, for short — making up a large part of the total. But while T-bills are as safe from default as anything on the planet, they yield a very low rate of return.
Was there a deep strategy behind this vast accumulation of low-yielding assets? Probably not. China acquired its $2 trillion stash — turning the People’s Republic into the T-bills Republic — the same way Britain acquired its empire: in a fit of absence of mind.
And just the other day, it seems, China’s leaders woke up and realized that they had a problem.
The low yield doesn’t seem to bother them much, even now. But they are, apparently, worried about the fact that around 70 percent of those assets are dollar-denominated, so any future fall in the dollar would mean a big capital loss for China. Hence Mr. Zhou’s proposal to move to a new reserve currency along the lines of the S.D.R.’s, or special drawing rights, in which the International Monetary Fund keeps its accounts.
But there’s both less and more here than meets the eye. S.D.R.’s aren’t real money. They’re accounting units whose value is set by a basket of dollars, euros, Japanese yen and British pounds. And there’s nothing to keep China from diversifying its reserves away from the dollar, indeed from holding a reserve basket matching the composition of the S.D.R.’s — nothing, that is, except for the fact that China now owns so many dollars that it can’t sell them off without driving the dollar down and triggering the very capital loss its leaders fear.
So what Mr. Zhou’s proposal actually amounts to is a plea that someone rescue China from the consequences of its own investment mistakes. That’s not going to happen.
And the call for some magical solution to the problem of China’s excess of dollars suggests something else: that China’s leaders haven’t come to grips with the fact that the rules of the game have changed in a fundamental way.
Two years ago, we lived in a world in which China could save much more than it invested and dispose of the excess savings in America. That world is gone.
Yet the day after his new-reserve-currency speech, Mr. Zhou gave another speech in which he seemed to assert that China’s extremely high savings rate is immutable, a result of Confucianism, which values “anti-extravagance.” Meanwhile, “it is not the right time” for the United States to save more. In other words, let’s go on as we were.
That’s also not going to happen.
The bottom line is that China hasn’t yet faced up to the wrenching changes that will be needed to deal with this global crisis. The same could, of course, be said of the Japanese, the Europeans — and us.
And that failure to face up to new realities is the main reason that, despite some glimmers of good news — the G-20 summit accomplished more than I thought it would — this crisis probably still has years to run.
在此次金融危机的开始阶段，有人开玩笑说，我们与中国的贸易变得公平、平衡了：他们卖给我们有毒玩具和受污染的海洋食品，我们卖给他们欺诈性的债券。
但这些天来，这笔交易的双方都不干了。一方面，世界对中国产品的偏好急剧下降。近几个月来，中国的出口大幅跳水，已经比一年前下降了26%。另一方面，中国明显对这些债券变得焦躁不安。
但是中国仍然存有不切实际的期望。这对我们大家都是个问题。
上周的一条大新闻就是中国人民银行行长周小川在一次讲话中，呼吁形成一种新的“超主权储备货币”。
共和党那些偏执狂立即警告，有一个阴谋，企图让美国放弃美元。但周小川的讲话实际只是一种虚弱的表现而已。实际上，他是说，中国已经把自己赶进了美元陷阱，他既不可能自己爬出来，也不可能改变原先让自己掉进这种陷阱的政策。
此事的背景是：在本世纪初，中国开始产生大量的贸易盈余，同时开始吸引大量的外资。如果中国有象加拿大那样的浮动汇率机制，这就会导致人民币汇率的上升。反过来，这就会放慢中国出口的增长。
但是中国选择了保持人民币对美元汇价的基本稳定。为此，在美元大量涌入时，中国就只能买进美元。这些年来，中国的贸易盈余一直增长。这样，中国拥有的外国资产也在一直增长。
现在，有关欺诈性债券的玩笑实在不公平。除了最近胡乱买进的股票（在市场高位）之外，中国积累的主要是非常安全的资产——美国国债，其中短期美国国债占了大部分。尽管这些美国国债没有不偿付的风险，但其回报其实很低。
在这些积累起来的大量低回报资产后面，有什么深谋远略吗？很可能没有。中国获得了2万亿美元储备——把人民共和国变成了美国国债共和国——与英国获得至高无上权利的方式一样：在不经意间。
只是在前些日子，似乎中国领导人觉醒了，并意识到他们遇到了问题。
即使现在，这些资产的低回报性似乎还没有困扰他们。但是，这些资产的70%是美元资产，所以将来美元跌落也就意味着中国资本的大笔损失。对此，他们明显感到担心。因此，周小川建议把国际货币基金组织（IMF）的记账单位“特别提款权”（SDR）作为新的储备货币。
但事情没这么简单。SDR不是真正的货币，只是记账单位。其价值由欧元、日元、英镑等组成的一篮子货币确定。中国绝不能在使其储备多元化时，能够摆脱美元。也绝不能把外汇储备变换成与SDR完全一样比例的一篮子货币。——绝不能够。而且还要考虑到，中国现在拥有数量如此之多的美元。当他们卖出美元的时候，肯定导致美元下跌，从而引起中国领导人最忧虑的资本损失。
所以，周小川的建议，实际上是一种恳求，恳求有人来拯救中国，使其免于遭受投资失败的后果。这是不会发生的。
还有，有人呼吁找到某种魔术般的办法来解决中国过多的美元问题。此事本身表明，中国领导人还没有意识到，游戏的规则已经根本改变了。
2年前，中国能够存下比其投资多得多的资金，而且能够处理好其在美国的过多存款。现在，这样的世界不存在了。
在发表有关新储备货币的讲话后一天，周小川在另一次讲话中，似乎断言中国的超高储蓄率是不可改变的。这要归因于儒家学说，它“反对过度奢侈”。同时，现在也不是美国提高储蓄率的“适当时机”。换言之，一切都不会改变。
这也是不会发生的。
中国还没有直面正在发生的变化。这些变化正是处理此次全球危机所需要的。当然，日本、欧洲，以及我们也都是这样。
没能直面新现实的主要原因是，尽管G20峰会带来了比我的想象更多的好消息，此次危机很可能还要数年才能过去。 |
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发表于 2009-6-6 00:37:01
