The Chinese yuan may not be as undervalued as expected by present day mercantilists.
According to the Economist, (bold highlights mine)
The yuan may well still be undervalued but our index suggests American manufacturing should have less to fear from Chinese competition than it did five years ago. Until June 2009 appreciation was largely because of the stronger yuan. Since then it is largely because China’s unit labour costs have grown much faster than America’s. Employers in China’s coastal factories have suffered labour shortages and strikes. America’s factories have reported strong productivity gains as they have wrung more out of the workers that survived the recession (although those gains will be hard to repeat).
Of course, China and America do not trade only with each other. China’s big surpluses and America’s big deficits depend on the real exchange rate between them and all of their trading partners. But calculating that would require timely estimates of unit labour costs for all of China’s trading partners. That is a bit too laborious.
The Economist is correct to point out implicitly how wrong present day mercantilists unduly fixate on China’s currency as the main mechanism for global trade.
These mercantilists allude to trade imbalances as the root of all economic problems and thus recommend policies grounded on ‘restoring balance’ via curtailing trade or applying protectionism (tariff, and controls) or inflationism (currency wars)
Yet the mercantilist perspective deliberately neglects or disregards all other variables or factors which mistakenly presume that the world operates in a “ceteris paribus” or an imaginary two nation world of US and China. Yes, they love to fantasize a world beyond or outside of reality.
Contrary to the mercantilist orthodoxy, trades imbalances are NOT the problem. Instead trade imbalances account for as symptoms of evolving geopolitical and world economic conditions and patterns which had been brought upon by present policies.
One of which is the Triffin Dilemma, which according to the Wikipedia.org, is the paradox by which “the country issuing the global reserve currency must be willing to run large trade deficits in order to supply the world with enough of its currency to fulfill world demand for foreign exchange reserves”.
Another is globalization.
Importantly, trade imbalancess signify as outcomes from voluntary action and not of government mechanistically engaged in trade for no apparent reason at all.
It is individuals who buy or sell services even if it is done with other individuals abroad.
Yet the mercantilist logic goes:
If I frequent my favorite pizza parlor, whose food I savor, which means I repeatedly incur a deficit with the pizza parlor, then the pizza parlor should be forced by edict to obtain my services (as a stock market agent) even if they refuse to get involved in the stock markets in order to balance our trade. By doing so, my favorite Pizza Parlor would only serve to people who they are willing to balance out which alternatively means going out of business. This circular reasoning by the mercantilists is all patent nonsense.
Individuals conduct trade to fulfil specific needs. And the division of labor and comparative advantages channelled via voluntary exchange is what allows our needs to be met. Territorial or geographic boundaries does not change this perspective.
And forcing people to balance trade would result to REDUCED trades, which ultimately leads to impoverishment via higher prices, shortages, diminished of choice of available products, inferior qualities and etc.
Besides, contrary to conventional mercantilists expectations, exports ALONE do NOT make a country prosperous. This mercantilist perspective, which aims to increase ‘surpluses’ by fiat or protectionism, actually confuses wealth with money and have long been demolished by Adam Smith (bold highlights mine)
I thought it necessary, though at the hazard of being tedious, to examine at full length this popular notion that wealth consists in money, or in gold and silver. Money in common language, as I have already observed, frequently signifies wealth, and this ambiguity of expression has rendered this popular notion so familiar to us that even they who are convinced of its absurdity are very apt to forget their own principles, and in the course of their reasonings to take it for granted as a certain and undeniable truth. Some of the best English writers upon commerce set out with observing that the wealth of a country consists, not in its gold and silver only, but in its lands, houses, and consumable goods of all different kinds. In the course of their reasonings, however, the lands, houses, and consumable goods seem to slip out of their memory, and the strain of their argument frequently supposes that all wealth consists in gold and silver, and that to multiply those metals is the great object of national industry and commerce.
The two principles being established, however, that wealth consisted in gold and silver, and that those metals could be brought into a country which had no mines only by the balance of trade, or by exporting to a greater value than it imported, it necessarily became the great object of political economy to diminish as much as possible the importation of foreign goods for home consumption, and to increase as much as possible the exportation of the produce of domestic industry. Its two great engines for enriching the country, therefore, were restraints upon importation, and encouragements to exportation.
In short, wealth is acquired through capital accumulation via savings and investment and expressed through voluntary exchange.
In truth, the undeserved obsession towards trade imbalances represent as selective perception and data mining applied by modern day mercantilists in order to justify all sorts of interventionism. They apply fallacious ‘cart before the horse’ reasoning.
Seen from the bigger picture trade deficits are part of the international transactions that can be seen from Balance of Payment (BOP) data where trade deficits are fundamentally offset by capital flows.
Professor Mark J. Perry points out that under double-entry accounting, debits have to equal credits, which applies to BOP accounting:
BOP = CURRENT ACCOUNT + CAPITAL ACCOUNT = CREDITS - DEBITS = 0
Professor Perry additionally writes,
The current account and capital account are the two main components of the U.S. Balance of Payments (BOP), which is a record of all international transactions for both: a) trade flows and b) capital flows in a given period. Every international transaction (e.g. export, import, U.S. investment abroad, foreign investment in the U.S.) is recorded on a double-entry accounting basis, so that each transaction involves both a debit and credit.
Professor Perry further notes that alarmism over deficits are unwarranted for the following reasons: (bold highlights mine)
1. There are no BOP deficits once we account for all international transactions, both for: a) goods and services, and b) financial transactions. For all of the one-sided coverage in the press about the "trade deficit," you would almost never even know that there is an offsetting "capital surplus" or "capital inflow." It's important for the general public to understand that trade deficits are offset by capital inflows on almost a 1:1 basis, resulting in a "balance of payments" for international transactions. When the public constantly hears about "trade deficits" without any understanding of the offsetting surplus, that economic ignorance allows politicians and special interest groups to exploit the general public, by advancing and promoting protectionist trade policies aimed to reduce the "trade deficit," or by refusing to approve trade agreements between Chile, Panama and Korea, etc.
2. The "trade deficit" generates so much negative coverage, that the significant advantages of capital inflows from abroad get frequently overlooked. Since 1980, the U.S. has attracted almost $8 trillion of foreign investment, which has provided much-needed equity capital that has allowed U.S. companies to start or expand, has provided much-needed debt capital that has also funded the expansion of American companies, along with providing debt capital for U.S. consumers in the form of mortgages, student loans, and car loans. Some of the $8 trillion of investment includes billions of dollars of Foreign Direct Investment, which has funded thousands of new projects in the U.S. (Toyota factories for example) and created hundreds of thousands of jobs.
This goes to show that “imbalances” serve more as political talking points meant to promote dogmatism than of observing factual operating circumstances.
Moreover what matters most is what mercantilists refuse to bring up in the imbalance debate: what seems to ail the US, isn’t China, but the entitlement mentality effected by the political leadership through inflationary policies (such as the recent housing bubble).
The negative effects of inflationism can be broken down into the following
-diverts resources to one that is not desired by the markets.
-crowds out the private sector
-generates systemic malinvestments.
-causes overvaluation in assets or the currency.
-misallocates the distribution of economic weighting towards areas preferred by government at the expense of the consumers.
-raises the costs of living.
-distorts corporate profitability and income streams
-raises the cost of doing business which translates to reduced competitiveness
-destabilizes the economy from the boom bust cycle which eventually leads to a consumption of capital.
The mercantalism-inflationist agenda does the opposite of what it intends to accomplish.
Applying real life examples, if the mercantilists-inflationists school is correct then Zimbabwe, North Korea, Cuba and Burma should have been the most prosperous countries (having been closed economies).
Ironically, the opposite is true, nations that have been economically free, are those whom have been prosperous.
Unfortunately reality isn’t what mercantilists are concerned with. Political religion is.
