1/8 This article suggests that thanks to big data, Chinese exporters can redirect sales from foreign consumers to domestic consumers. It cites as an example a toothbrush manufacturer for whom exports now account for 60% of sales, down from 90%, after... bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
2/8 Alibaba data on what Chinese consumers want helped them to figure out how to sell more domestically. The article goes on cite to Bai Ming, deputy director of the Ministry of Commerce as saying: “Turning to the domestic market adds one more option for Chinese exporters. In...
3/8 the future, exporters can sell to the market that’s most favorable, which reduces risks.”
This kind of thinking represents a classic fallacy of composition that is far too common in most discussions of Chinese rebalancing. While it is true that certain individual...
4/8 exporters can use big data to reduce their sales of consumer goods abroad while selling more at home, it is impossible for them to do so collectively. The reason China has an export surplus is because total domestic consumption is too low to allow Chinese manufacturers to...
5/8 sell at home all they produce.
That is why a reduction in exports cannot simply be redirected to domestic consumption. Fewer exports means lower national income and, with it, higher domestic unemployment, which in turn means less, not more, domestic consumption. This...
6/8 can only be resolved either by higher public-sector investment (and more debt) or by allowing higher domestic unemployment to persist.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, there are only two ways of increasing the consumption share of total Chinese production.
7/8 The unsustainable way is to increase household debt, and the sustainable way is directly or indirectly to increase the share ordinary Chinese households retain of Chinese GDP. China’s net exports are not a cause of low domestic consumption. They are a consequence. That...
8/8 is why for Chinese manufacturers collectively to export less doesn’t mean they can sell more to domestic consumers. It just means that they sell less overall, which without government intervention must result in more domestic unemployment and less total domestic consumption.
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1/10
Interesting study suggesting that there is no evidence that higher public debt levels are associated with lower economic growth. I am not especially surprised because there are so many different conditions under which debt can emerge.
2/10
In fact this is one of my main criticisms of much academic economics. Perhaps because of the mathematical tools available to economists, there are far too many studies that try to correlate very complex phenomena against some simple measure, such as GDP growth.
3/10
But this is likely to be meaningless. There are many different types of economies, different types of debt, and different uses for debt. There is also a wide range of relationships between the asset and liability sides of an economy. All of these matter.
1/6 China’s total social financing (the best official measure of debt) rose in the first quarter by 8.8% year on year, to RMB 390.3 trillion. This is the lowest rate of increase in over 20 years, which may at first seem like a good thing from...
2/6 a debt-sustainability point of view, but according to China's NIFD, the country's "macro leverage" ratio, a proxy for debt-to-GDP, "inched up" (according to Caixin) by 6.8 percentage points in the first quarter of 2024, to 294.8%.
http://114.115.232.154:8080/
3/6 In fact that's a very large increase. It rose by just twice that amount, or by 13.5 percentage points, in all of 2023, which already represented a pretty bad year for debt. In the three years before COVID, for example, it rose by 3-4 percentage points a year on average.
1/15
Foreign ministry spokesperson Li Jian says that the U.S. "overcapacity" narrative is a very blunt US policy tool whose purpose is to undermine Chinese industry. He isn't completely wrong: there is a lot of confusion over what "overcapacity" means.
2/15
China's domination of certain industrial sectors, for example, isn't in itself overcapacity. As Li noted, "The US exports 80% of its chips, especially advanced chips, and is a large exporter of pork and agricultural products. Is that 'overcapacity' according to US logic?"
3/15
A week earlier vice finance minister Liao Min said something similar – "the so-called 'overcapacity' is a manifestation of the market mechanism at work, where supply-demand imbalance is often the norm".
1/8 Although Russell Napier is right to identify China's high and soaring debt as a major problem for the economy, he then says: "China needs to not just reflate its economy but to inflate away its debts."
2/8 That would be a terrible mistake, and I think the PBoC understands why.
You cannot just "inflate away" debt. Inflation is just a mechanism for resolving debt by passing on the costs to net monetary savers.
3/8 In China's case, businesses, SOEs and the government are net borrowers, while households are high net savers. Inflating away the debt simply means forcing household savers to subsidize businesses, SOEs and borrowers.
1/6 This NYT article shows just how confused many economists continue to be about trade. They worry that because in recent years a few economies have been implementing trade and industrial policies, this means an end to free trade and free markets.
2/6 This turning away from free markets, they say, will constrain future growth.
Leave aside that industrial and trade policies have often expanded growth, their worries show just how little they understand what free trade and comparative advantage mean.
3/6 The world turned away from free trade decades ago. The large, persistent surpluses that have characterized global trade since the 1980s are largely the consequences of beggar-thy-neighbor trade policies aimed at boosting domestic growth a the expense of trade partners.
1/5 Chinese GDP grew by 5.3% in the first quarter of 2024, well above expectations, reinforcing concerns that GDP growth in China means something quite different than GDP growth in economies that operate under hard-budget constraints.
2/5 While most economists inside and outside China recognize that sustainable GDP growth in China requires that consumption play a stronger role in driving growth, with investment and the trade surplus playing a declining role, the opposite happened in the past three months.
3/5 Retail sales continued to lag in the first quarter, while much of the period's growth was driven by higher investment in infrastructure and (especially) manufacturing and a large trade surplus. China is still having trouble boosting domestic consumption, in other words.