Recently, the most frequently asked question is, how big is the impact of the crisis on China?
Frankly speaking, no one can give a degree accurately, but I may be able to give some perspectives, such as global pattern, abstract calculation, historical space-time conjecture and so on.
If you highly abstract the global economy in recent years 10, you will find that the Sino-American economy is a "circle". Consumption (saving) and investment, the two most basic economic activities, occur in two different economies respectively.
China and the United States have completely opposite economic forms. In the United States, the consumption rate is as high as 72%, and the highly complex financial system continuously drains liquidity from the bottom up, which is transformed into consumer credit and consumption expansion. In China, the high savings rate of 5 1.2% is transformed into a high investment rate of 43%, resulting in output much higher than consumption.
From the perspective of a single economy, it is seriously unbalanced. When China and the United States unite, the global economy becomes more balanced. But the economy has national boundaries after all.
Americans don't save, they only consume. In the third quarter of 2008, the American household savings rate actually dropped to-1.7%. Americans are hungry for food and in debt. In 2007, the US current account deficit accounted for 5.28% of GDP, and the US net debt exceeded 30%.
A country's economic growth is inseparable from savings, which is the most basic and necessary condition for a country's economic growth. As a result, a special savings mobilization mechanism has emerged in the United States-asset-based savings. In China, it is called "property income", which means the same thing.
The super-strong financial market in the United States continues to provide refinancing facilities for financial assets held. Through the cycle of "financing"-"buying new financial assets"-"refinancing"-"continuing to buy new financial assets"-"refinancing", investors can get increasing returns. Since the mid-1990s, the income of many ordinary Americans and the money for eating, drinking and having fun have not come from normal wages, but from the appreciation and refinancing of houses and stocks. Because houses and stocks can be re-loaned if they increase in value, so money is borrowed repeatedly. This feeling also exists in China. During the stock market bubble last year, "re-mortgage loan" was a very popular business of banks, and investors thought that money could grow out of computers every day. The bubble age is like a person standing in front of a mirror, and everything is deformed.
So you can see that the stock market and property market in this country are highly related to consumption. We did an empirical study. Rising house prices in the United States will increase the real growth rate of household consumption by 1.4 percentage points. There is an obvious correlation between the stock return rate and the actual consumption growth rate which is one year behind, and the correlation coefficient is as high as 0.44.
In addition, the United States has one of the most important mechanisms, that is, dollar hegemony and no savings. Through dollar hegemony, I can occupy the savings of other countries. The issuance of US dollar bills does not need the endorsement of gold, and the issuance of US debt does not need American savings as a guarantee. From 65438 to 0974, the Bretton Woods system was officially declared bankrupt. Especially in the last decade, with the emerging markets, such as China, merging into the wave of globalization, China has become not only the production base of Americans, but also the bank of Americans. Americans exchange colored paper for all kinds of goods and services they need.
China people don't have a super-strong financial system, and the RMB has no coinage hegemony as an international currency. Therefore, if the economy wants to grow, it can only save and invest honestly.
Savings cannot transform the surplus of investment, and capital can only be exported to the United States in the form of surplus. However, it is not through private investment, but a slightly compulsory central bank reserve, which is recovered back to the United States in the form of US Treasury bonds and the purchase of US dollar assets. Is to lend money to Americans. Because the efficiency of China's financial system is not enough to transform China's huge savings into effective investments, the US financial system has actually become the center of global capital allocation, not just the savings flowing to China.
After the complicated financial system in the United States, China's surplus savings were converted into American consumption, which was also an order made in China. And the other part, transformed into various forms of FDI and even hot money, re-entered the most profitable departments and projects under the China system. Therefore, the so-called "dark matter" mystery has always existed in the balance of payments of the United States. A country with a net foreign debt of $2.5 trillion is heavily in debt, but it can get a net investment income of nearly $80 billion without paying any interest every year. The high surplus and the expectation of RMB appreciation correspond to the huge accumulation of reserves. Since China overtook Japan in June 2006 with US$ 860 billion, its foreign exchange reserves have reached nearly US$ 2 trillion in two years.
In the past decade, on the east and west sides of the Pacific Ocean, such a Sino-American economic capital logistics circle has actually been formed, which is called "Sino-American economic union" by many economists. This cycle has served as the main "water pump" for global liquidity in the past decade. American consumption is converted into China's savings, and then flows back to the United States by buying American bonds. In the United States, the warm flow of funds along its complex financial processing system has led to the rise of American real estate and stocks, greatly improving the wealth of American families and society, which has been recycled to the consumer market. But it's all over. When the last waiter in the United States can realize the dream of "home ownership", the house price in the United States will rise to the top, and the consumption cake in the United States will not expand further. The real estate subprime loan overflowed when it was full, and the warm current turned into a cold current, which spread all over the world in an instant.
The debate is still unclear. People in China said that the American consumption culture of eating and begging for food promoted China's savings, which led to a serious structural imbalance in China. Americans say that China's savings are constantly turning into dollars and short-term US Treasury bonds, and the US interest rate has remained low for a long time, so that Americans have always had money to buy shoes, clothes, flat-screen TVs and paintings made in China, and of course American houses. Americans then use these houses as collateral to increase their expenses by borrowing money-they enjoy more wealth without increasing their income.
But one thing is certain: 200 1 China's entry into WTO is definitely a landmark event in the reconstruction of the world economic map. A huge economy with distorted prices has been thrown into the wave of globalization. Global factor flows and subsidies from China have objectively reduced the production cost of global manufacturing industry, so the supply has been strongly pushed up, and product prices naturally cannot rise. Without the pressure of inflation, Americans can cut interest rates freely, loosen money supply and save the "new economy" engine that is gradually failing through asset price drive. This power source began in the 1980s, mainly in the United States. The "major innovation activity cluster" with the revolution of information and network technology as the main content has greatly promoted the prosperity and development of the American economy. The emergence of the "new economy", marked by the internet bubble, led to the decline of the American economy in March 2006. It marks that the 30-year cycle of this round has essentially entered a downward stage. When the most essential motive force of economic growth is lost, once the asset-based economic model is promoted by the bubble of real estate investment and credit consumption, the world economy will inevitably fall into a serious recession.
Obviously, if the economic cycle between China and the United States is to flow again, American financial consumption must be restored, but do Americans dare to borrow money? Even if Americans still have the habit of borrowing money for consumption, do banks dare to borrow it?
If the pattern of borrowing and consumption is unsustainable, then the only way for the United States to restore balance in the future is to save money, that is, the American household savings rate has no choice but to rise.
As we know, savings are the surplus after income minus consumption. Therefore, how much the American household savings rate rises means how much the American household consumption falls. These are two sides of the same coin, or the same thing. Americans can't consume so many China products, so China people have to consume them themselves. It means how much the unbalanced China needs corresponding consumption increment.
An American economist once made a simple and abstract calculation: in the 50 years before 1990, the savings deposit interest rate of American residents generally accounted for 6% to 10% of GDP, but it dropped to only 2% after 1997. It is estimated that the household savings rate in the United States needs to rise to at least 5% of GDP, which means that the corresponding items of household consumption in the United States will fall by this extent. Considering that the economic scale of the United States is about 3.3 times that of China, and consumption only accounts for less than 50% of China's income, I am afraid that China's consumption growth must increase by at least 40% to balance the 5% savings growth in the United States, which is almost impossible for China in the short term.
China has no real social security system, no real medical insurance and unemployment insurance. If there is no social safety net, even if the government issues coupons like western countries, it is hard to see that China people will no longer restrain most of their desire to buy.
What is more critical than the secondary distribution is the primary distribution, because it depends on the growth path and mode embodied in this economy. In the past five years, the direction of heavy chemical industry and capital-intensive industry in China has inevitably made the initial distribution of national income more and more biased towards the government and capital, and the share of workers' remuneration and residents' savings offices has been shrinking. The government and enterprises are getting more and more money, so they can only invest and form production capacity. If they can't spend it at home, they can only sell it abroad and form a surplus. So you can see that high savings will inevitably lead to high investment, which in turn will lead to high savings, and so on, until one day the external demand really crosses, and this cycle will be completely over.
The only way to restore China's balance in the future is to eliminate high savings and restore the balance through a large number of enterprise closures, a large number of capacity clearance, rising unemployment rate and government debt, and the wealth of the whole country will pay a huge price for this.
In the next few years, we will see that the Sino-American economy will definitely undergo a rebalancing process, and the 72% consumption rate in the United States will return to the equilibrium range of 65% ~ 67% within 30 years from 1970 to 2000. China's industrial growth will also return to 10% ~ 12% from the high level of more than 20%.
If we make a historical time-space guess, the role played by the United States in 1929 is exactly the role played by China in today's rebalancing movement. In the crisis of overcapacity, countries with current account surpluses are often more vulnerable. Because the tug-of-war of rebalancing means capacity contraction for trade surplus countries and capacity expansion for trade deficit countries. From the example of 1930, the United States, a country with a trade surplus at that time, was hit harder than Britain, a country with a trade deficit. 19291On October 24th, the new york stock market crashed, reaching its lowest point 1932, and the stock market fell by about 90%, with about 9,000 financial institutions closed down. The GDP of 1933 was only about/kloc-0 of/929.
The impact of this crisis on China is enormous, bad and, to some extent, good. At least let's clarify some specious arguments in the past few years and what kind of growth path China should take.
More and more studies have concluded that the primary factor supporting China's brilliant achievements in the past 30 years is China's advantages in global labor arbitrage. In 2002, the average hourly wage of China's manufacturing industry only reached $0.57, even though it has doubled in recent years, it is actually only 6% of the hourly wage of $265,438+$0.40 in the United States. It is also very different from other countries. The hourly wage of manufacturing workers in China is 50% of that of Mexico and Brazil, 20% of that of newly industrialized economies in Asia (namely, Taiwan Province Province, South Korea, Hongkong and Singapore), and only 6% of that of Japan and Europe. What China needs is labor-intensive growth, not labor-saving growth. Employment is the starting point of all problems.
The best way to achieve this goal is to tilt resources to private capital and small and medium-sized enterprises and support their transformation to modern service industry and modern manufacturing industry, rather than focusing on chemical industry. The two are actually complementary. By extending the value chain of modern manufacturing industry, by purchasing raw materials, doing R&D design, logistics, selling networks, making brands and goodwill, and doing retail, we will create a modern service industry that absorbs a large number of jobs. China has the largest market and the strongest manufacturing capacity, but it lacks independent intellectual property rights, technologies and standards, and logistics services. These areas are fully qualified for us to enter the high-end competition of the value chain.
We firmly believe that the gloomy history of 80 years ago cannot be repeated in China. At least so far, the balance sheets of China government, enterprises, residents and financial departments are healthy. In 2007, the deficit ratio of China government was only 0.6%, and the debt ratio was nearly 18%, which was far from the international red line (3% in deficit ratio and 60% in debt ratio). The leverage ratio of major banks in China is 65,438. China is politically stable, financially sound, financially sound, and has a strong ability to resist external shocks. From the demand point of view, the urbanization rate of China is only 43%, and the population agglomeration of China is far from complete, which determines that the space for economic growth and transformation in China is very broad.
If we strengthen the implementation of the "Scientific Outlook on Development", bid farewell to the old model of the old times, accelerate the pace of deep-seated system reform, reduce monopoly, relax administrative control, release economic vitality and promote economic restructuring. We are sure to minimize the pain of rebalancing, achieve a soft landing, turn crisis into opportunity, turn passivity into initiative, and create another economic miracle in China.
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