For today Bloomberg reports that China has launched a new monetary stimulus program:
China’s central bank has unveiled a broad package of stimulus measures to revive the world’s second-largest economy, underscoring Xi Jinping’s government’s growing tensions with slowing growth and investor confidence.
But is this really what happened? Here is the exchange rate of Chinese yuan responded to Monday’s news:
Note that this is actually the value of the yuan in dollars, so the sharp fall indicated the to appreciate of yuan. The flat stretch is the weekend period, when the markets were closed.
I can’t be sure, but it seems to me that the markets initially treated the news as monetary stimulus, and then reversed course significantly. Michael Pettis argued that China’s monetary policy has become intertwined with credit policy.
China’s financial system today and Japan’s then is structured in such a way that capital expansion results primarily in credit expansion, which, for well-understood institutional reasons, is directed primarily to the supply side of the economy.
If so, markets are likely to perceive this as more akin to fiscal stimulus than monetary stimulus. Note that currencies usually fall when there is unexpected bailout news, and currencies tend to appreciate bailout news (at least in countries where there is little fear of a bailout.) The Bloomberg article offers some support for a possible view. The debt is reduced in excess of the income reduction:
Those moves were followed by a slew of other announcements that fueled gains in China’s troubled stock market. The central bank chief also unveiled a package to bolster the country’s troubled real estate sector, which includes lowering borrowing costs for up to $5.3 trillion in mortgages and easing rules for buying a second home.
Another article on Bloomberg suggested that China is in an economic crisis:
China now has all the hallmarks of a “balance sheet recession”: prolonged periods of inflation, declining property markets, and credit defaults. And, as in Japan, this has followed a period of incredible expansion.
I don’t like the term “balance sheet recessions”, as these are hard currency recessions—periods of reduced NGDP growth caused by tight monetary policy. Real estate prices are falling and delinquency is a sign of a strong currency. The latest blog postI suggested that China needs a monetary stimulus. I suspect that what they are getting is close to financial incentives.
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