China braces for spectulation in the yuan (New York Times) Updated: 2005-07-25 15:38
A day after China moved to revalue its currency, the country is bracing to
see whether the shift will set off a huge influx of speculative capital.
The move Thursday by the central bank to revalue the yuan, and drop its
peg to the dollar, was praised by economists here as an important step for China
as it moves toward a more market-oriented economy.
But these same experts say China now faces a difficult balancing act as
it tries to control the amount of speculative capital, or "hot money," that
flows in and out of the country. One measure of the giant inflows is the
nation's foreign exchange reserves, which now total more than $711 billion,
second only to Japan.
By raising the value of the yuan by just 2 percent, with the tantalizing
possibility of further increases to follow, China may have made even more
attractive what is already one of the world's most popular places to invest.
The Chinese economy has boomed in the last few years with money pouring
in at a pace of nearly $20 billion a month, and the delicate task for Beijing
officials now lies in making sure that this incoming tide neither increases nor
decreases in large amounts.
"This is the most important thing for China right now," said Andy Xie, an
economist at Morgan Stanley. "China has to be really careful not to encourage
hot money to come in and not to push it out."
Tens of billions of dollars worth of speculative money is already
flooding into China. If that torrent expands significantly, it could feed
inflation in an already feverish economy. But if China acts too decisively to
choke off inflows, useful investments could also be derailed and growth could
suffer.
The currency move was seen by analysts largely as an effort by China to
appease its biggest trading partners, many of whom had complained for two years
that a weak currency gave China an unfair advantage in global commerce.
But with just a 2 percent increase in the value of the yuan against
the dollar, some analysts said China was signaling that a larger yuan
appreciation was in store and thereby inadvertently encouraging speculators to
rush into the country. While the Bush administration welcomed this first step
toward currency reform, the huge speculative capital inflows that are now being
forecast here could ignite inflationary pressure and further complicate the
Chinese government's effort to manage the world's fastest-growing major economy,
which expanded by a stronger-than-expected 9.5 percent in the second quarter of
this year.
"As long as China's economy continues to grow, there will inevitably be
hot money betting on the value of the currency increasing," Zhang Yuncheng, a
researcher at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations,
said.
Some economists say the risks of speculative capital flooding into the
country and overheating the economy are overstated, that the speculative inflows
have begun to slow, and that the government has found new ways to prevent money
from entering the country.
In the last few months, China adopted measures to assert greater control
over inflows. Economists now say those were clearly an attempt to prepare for
Thursday's shift in currency policy. One of the most important controls has been
to limit further the ability of banks to borrow money overseas, bring it home
and convert it into yuan to issue loans in China.
The State Administration of Foreign Exchange has also stepped up
monitoring of foreign investments in China. Its officials are checking that
investors actually build factories and other government-approved operations,
instead of using money brought into the country to acquire property, invest in
the stock market or simply sit in bank accounts awaiting a currency move,
experts say.
There are many ways to evade the capital controls. The simplest is to
sneak large sums of cash across the border; to make it harder to change dollars
into yuan, clerks at Chinese hotels now demand to see a passport and insist that
guests fill out a form when converting currency.
A more complicated approach is for a company to ship goods to its
overseas subsidiary and overbill the subsidiary. Part of the subsidiary's
payment is used to pay for the actual goods and the rest is invested, often in
real estate.
"There are leakages," said Frank Gong, an economist at J. P. Morgan
Chase. "Each year about $50 billion to $60 billion in hot money comes in. But
that only accounts for 8 percent of fixed-asset investments. That's a small
portion. So the impact on the economy will be small."
But other economists say the Chinese government statistics suggest that
over the last few years there have been huge inflows of capital that cannot be
accounted for in the normal foreign exchange channels.
"There was a massive increase in what they call errors and omissions,"
said Nicholas R. Lardy, a senior fellow at the Institute for International
Economics, referring to national statistics on capital flows. "This was huge
last year, about $20 billion. Historically, that number has been negative. It's
been money flowing out."
After three years of capital flight, $7.8 billion flowed into China
during 2002 and $1.8 billion in 2003. Then in 2004, that figure jumped to $27
billion. Now economists are warning that huge flows of money into the country
could create inflationary pressure.
Thus far, however, inflation in China has been under control.
"When you have $1 trillion in trade transactions, it's very hard to
control that money," Mr. Lardy said. "They've dodged the bullet so far on
inflation. But if they have more inflows it may be difficult to keep this up."
Some of the inflows - more than $300 billion, by some projections - have
come from overseas during the last few years and piled up here in China on the
expectation that a significant currency revaluation would bring easy profits
when converted back into dollars.
Many investors and speculators had been betting on a 10 percent to 20
percent appreciation in the yuan this year.
Now, some economists say the authorities might let the yuan appreciate
further so that within 12 months, the currency could be worth as much as 10
percent more than it was at the start of 2005. A recent World Bank study
projected that the yuan would be valued around 5.8 to the dollar by 2010, and
2.8 to the dollar by 2020.
Mr. Xie at Morgan Stanley says that if too much of that money comes at
once, China's economy will roar. But if the speculators sense that the currency
will not further appreciate, a huge amount of capital could flee the country and
deflate asset prices, creating a situation similar to the 1997 Asian financial
crisis.
"It's really a fine balance China has to pull off," he said. "This is
what this game is about for China - stability."
(courtesy of New York Times)
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