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We do not need China or anyone else to buy our securities and we net benefit enormously from net imports in general.
The profoundly confused China policy comes from an administration that both does not understand the monetary system and does not understand that imports are real benefits and exports real costs:
by Adrian Van Eck
May 29 — The communist rulers of China have laid down a threat to the government of the United States of America. They are the largest foreign holders of treasury bonds. They say they fear that the huge Federal deficit this year – four times the record deficit set last year – will bring on inflation of such a magnitude as to threaten the buying power of their treasury holdings. They have said that if Washington does not stop this massive deficit spending (much of it financed with money created by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve)
All–not some, or most of government spending is a matter of ‘changing numbers in bank accounts at the fed’ (as per Bernanke’s statement last month).
Govt spending adds varying degrees of aggregate demand, government taxing reduces demand, and government borrowing supports interest rates. ‘Financing’ as the word is generally used does not apply to the issuer of a non convertible currency with a floating exchange rate.
they will protect their own interests by dumping all of their holdings of U.S. treasuries on the market for whatever price they can get for them. They say they will do so even if that collapses the U.S. dollar and pulls down not only the American economy but the economy of the entire world.
To date ‘their own interest’ has been that of supporting their export industries by suppressing their real wages.
So this statement would indicate they are threatening to move away from an export led strategy. Possible, but hard to believe and contradicts what follows here.
Apparently Washington has taken this threat seriously. All of a sudden China is being overrun by important officials from the U.S. Government. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is one of the Americans traveling to Beijing. In past years she has been well known in both the U.S, and China as one who dislikes the rulers of Mainland China. A few years ago she barely escaped being arrested by a pack of Party goons as she led a group of Americans protesting China’s policies toward the formerly independent nation of Tibet, which China overran and conquered soon after they won the Chinese Civil War some 60 years ago. A few days ago she was fawning over China’s Government leaders, telling them how we want to cooperate with them in working to protect the environment. (As usual they blamed America for polluting the Earth, ignoring the fact that it is China which is the worst polluter anywhere.) She must have almost gagged on her own sweet words as she talked.
The second important American Government official in China was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She has never been thought of as an enemy of China’s communist rulers, so it was easier for her to talk with them. (There were rumors that money from China helped fund her husband’s re-election campaign.) Unfortunately the visit came about as China’s neighbor and close ally – North Korea – exploded a nuclear device reported to be as powerful as the one America dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. They also fired off several rockets. All of this violated the terms of an agreement they signed in 2006 – an agreement that brought them enormous quantities of fuel oil and food. When the nations that negotiated that treaty protested the nuclear explosion, North Korea announced that it was renouncing its agreement to a truce that ended the war in the 1950’s. That again called for Secretary of State Clinton to try and patch up relations without pushing the virtual outlaw nation into crossing the border and attacking South Korea. This made the response to China in threatening America – a definite form of blackmail, as nations such as India and Japan agreed – a secondary issue with Hillary.
That left Treasury Secretary Geithner to absorb the heaviest verbal blows from China’s leaders during his own visit to Beijing. They knew that Geithner, as the president of the independent Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the largest and most important of the privately-owned regional Feds, had himself made threats to China shortly before being confirmed by the Senate to take over the top job at Treasury. He had told the Senate that if China did not stop manipulating the yuan in the foreign exchange market to gain an unfair advantage in its trade he would be in favor of America taking steps on its own to counter this in the foreign exchange market.
What sense does all this make?
China was buying dollars to keep the dollar strong and the yuan weak as part of their strategy to support exports by suppressing domestic costs vs rest of world costs.
Geithner was pushing for a weaker dollar as a way to reduce China’s exports by, in effect, causing prices of goods made in China at Wal-Mart to rise to the point where they wouldn’t sell as well.
Now China is threatening to do the opposite- push the dollar down by selling its USD financial assets, and Geithner is doing the opposite by trying to stop them.
He has since had to swallow those words and now he has to swallow as well threats against America by China.
This administration is in it way over its head and is pursuing a totally confused policy.
We thought it was fascinating that no one in the media mentioned Ben Bernanke or commented on his complete absence from the dialogue with China. So I will take it on myself to make such a comment. Bernanke is, after all, the one man closely tied to the creation of the money that so offends the communists in Beijing and one might have expected him to be involved in current talks with China’s rulers - under normal circumstances. A while back, he went to China as part of a delegation and he was asked to make a speech at a university where China trains many of its economists. Bernanke was brutally candid in his remarks. He pointed out precisely all of the mistakes he felt they were making in their centrally planned economy - and predicted that they were heading for trouble so bad that it might bring the ruling Party and the country down, just as a dozen prior dynasties had come crashing down during China’s long history. The woman who serves as China’s economics minister was livid with rage after his remarks. She took over and screamed insults at him for a half hour. Then she called President Bush and said that Bernanke was “persona non grata,” a diplomatic phrase meaning he would never again be welcomed to China. Months later when a Chinese delegation paid a return visit to Washington, they carefully avoided the Fed’s marble headquarters.
Not a whisper has escaped that anyone knows about from the ideas expressed by Tim Geithner concerning China’s threats if America does not sharply curb its deficit spending.
For China’s export strategy to ’succeed’ they need high levels of aggregate demand in the US.
Yet it is clear from everything happening in Washington that this Administration has absolutely zero intention of stopping its near reckless abandon of any restraint in Federal spending.
In fact, the deficit spending has not even begun to get high enough to restore aggregate demand to levels where unemployment stops rising, never mind falling.
We need to remove a lot more fiscal drag to restore demand, now the unsustainable (non-government) credit chennels have been capped.
Quite the contrary, as new demands are made they are coming up with more plans to lavish Federal spending on recipients. For example, the latest we are hearing regarding General Motors is that the Federal Government may be willing to hand the company $50 billion on top of the money allocated to them already. But Washington would then want to gain 70% ownership in what critics are calling “Federal Motors.”
The problem here is the administrations looks for public purpose in the ‘input’ side rather than the output side. The public purpose of industry is the output it produces, not how the inputs, particularly labor, get rewarded.
Output is directed by markets working within institutional structure which can be modified to influence output towards public purpose while sustaining full employment at all times. But not with an administration that has it all backwards.
And now we have California’s demand that the Federal Government guarantee $18 billion in State borrowing to fund their own wild deficit spending. Political pressures are building to make this happen. If that does happen, a lot of other states will be lining up at the White House front door to demand the same treatment.
The answer here is to give all states $500 per capita of revenue sharing with no strings attached. California would get about $17 billion.
That way it’s ‘fair’ and there is no ‘moral hazard’ issue.
But, again, this hasn’t even been discussed.
This brings us to a topic that is being brushed aside as being too unlikely to even deserve treatment as a rumor. Thus it is being dismissed out of hand in the national media. Yet it is springing up from several key Washington sources and that makes us suspicious that where there is so much smoke there may be fire. What I am talking about, of course, is the sudden discussion of an American Value Added Tax – another name for a national sales tax. It would apply to goods and services alike. Most nations in the world including China itself now have such a VAT tax. It is called value added because each company is taxed only on the value it adds to raw materials or parts it buys and manufactures or assembles into a product. Trucks and hairdressers and even lawyers would be taxed under a VAT.
Even at a rate as low as 10%, which would be seen as very low in the world, it would raise a ton of money. Some are proposing a rate high enough to allow the income tax to be ended but that idea is being shot down by agents of the Administration. The idea would be sold to conservatives as a way to avoid the huge inflation that China is warning against… and also to make unlikely that America would be forced to go back to pre-Reagan Federal income tax rates of just about double those paid today. And industry would be told that – just as happens in other nations with a VAT – it would be forgiven on any goods or services marked for export. I think these VAT tax rumors are for real and I suggest you keep an eye on this. More next week. Adrian Van Eck.
The VAT is even more regressive than the payroll taxes still on the books.
And with consumption being the entire point of the economics it makes no sense to tax consumption in general.
‘Sin’ and ‘luxury’ taxes are different- the idea is to limit consumption of those items subject to the tax, and not to raise revenue. The success of the tax is then judged by how few dollars are collected, not how many as with the VAT.
Now more than ever the US would benefit from an administration that understood the monetary system and the simple fundamentals regarding imports and exports.
But this is not going to happen, and we will continue to pay the price.
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