Viewpoint: Blue Christmas for China
By William Pesek (Bloomberg)Updated: 2006-11-03 09:21
It's beginning to look like Christmas for China's central bank, but officials there can't be overjoyed. The season of peace and joy is anything but that for the folks in Beijing trying to tame an economy that seems constantly in the holiday spirit. Try as they may, Chinese authorities can't seem to get growth to less than 10 percent.
For a world in need of economic engines, China just never stops giving. For Chinese officials, it's a daunting challenge that could result in overheating and the hard landing some predict in the world's No.4 economy.
So far, China has held things together remarkably well, and without the sharp increase in the yuan's value that the United States has been demanding. All this has placed a tremendous burden on the People's Bank of China.
It's a daunting balancing act, really. The central bank must try to regulate China's work-in-progress economy without traditional tools like a highly liquid bond market. And even if so-called hot money is slowing, thanks to policy steps taken by the government, the central bank is very much in the hot seat.
"Things are about to get a lot harder for the PBOC," says Stephen Green, an economist at Standard Chartered in Shanghai. "It's going to take a gargantuan effort on their part to keep market yields stable."
While much of the world slows down for the holidays, the People's Bank of China will have to step up efforts to maintain the current level of bond and money-market interest rates. On that front, Green says, the bank faces a "triple whammy of liquidity."
Holiday shopping is one challenge. At year end, China's trade surplus tends to swell because of all the shopping that consumers from Cleveland to Tel Aviv do at China Inc. From October to December, $35 billion to $40 billion of funds will enter China through the trade account, Green predicts. Add in foreign direct investment and other money, and Green expects close to $60 billion of inflows in the current quarter.
Debt management is the second challenge. "Several tons" of central-bank bills are coming up for redemption, says Green, who puts the figure at $78 billion in the current quarter and an additional $108 billion in the first three months of 2007. "All this has to be mopped up with more bills before the PBOC even gets started sterilizing new flows," Green says.
Because China doesn't "sterilize" all the foreign exchange reserves it accumulates, its money base increases, undermining efforts to curb credit growth. Sterilization means that steps are taken to neutralize the effects of rising reserves on money growth. China's stockpile of reserves is approaching $1 trillion.
Finally, this is the season when China tends to spend more money than it saves. Economists note that increased amounts of revenue often flow to local governments and China's various ministries during the fourth quarter. It means the central bank will have to help smooth out government spending, too.
"The bottom line is this: rates are going to come under more pressure to fall," Green says. "Unless the PBOC ramps things up, the yield curve is going to sink back down under the weight of these mammoth inflows."
Given the magnitude of the task, it would be remarkable if China's interest-rate system didn't provide even more stimulus in an economy that needs less. As the International Monetary Fund noted this week, "financial innovations, such as the introduction of short-term corporate bills and discount bills, have lowered borrowing costs."
Moreover, the IMF said, "without a significant further tightening of monetary policy, a continued rise in credit growth would fuel a further increase in investment growth that would likely be followed by price declines in overcapacity sectors and an associated rise in banks' nonperforming loans."
It doesn't help that excess cash generated by the easy- money policies of central bankers from Washington to Tokyo continues to head China's way. Once upon a time, a central banker's job was to take away the punchbowl just as the party got going. Now, all too many are leaving the punchbowl out too long.
For all the progress that Asia has made in addressing the causes of the 1997 crisis, the region is still too dependent on exports and not enough on domestic demand. That means holding interest rates low so that currencies won't strengthen. It leaves Asia vulnerable to inflation and bubbles in the months ahead.
At a minimum, it may cause short-term interest rates and long-term bond yields in Asia to be higher next year than many investors expect. Letting currencies rise in value could alleviate some inflation risks in Asia, especially in China.
"How long are you going to keep holding it back?" asks Stephen Gollop, chief executive of the investment advisory firm Bridgewater in Hong Kong. The Chinese currency "is way behind any of the other currencies out there."
The latest sign of how much cash is rushing to China was last month's share sale by Industrial & Commercial Bank of China. The world's biggest initial public offering raised $19.1 billion. It attracted more than $500 billion in orders, underlining how much liquidity is sloshing around the globe.
Investors watching their ICBC shares surge may be thinking that Christmas has come early this year. Officials at China's central bank are probably hoping it doesn't come at all.
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