外文报刊评中国经济――亚洲时报

mmdzz

园地的大幅降息教育俺：别做吃利息不干活的白日梦。想挣币吗？想求书吗？踏踏实实为大家做些贡献吧，我为人人－》人人为我，这是园地的宗旨。

遵照宏观调控精神，老汉俺打算搞个“外文报刊评中国经济”的长期系列，为园友们随时介绍一些重要外文报刊对中国经济的评论。主要就是中文内容摘要，原文copy，为便于园友阅读，尽量加些中文小标题。可能还有一些个人的评价，或摘译、缩译一些个人认为有价值或有趣味的东西。因为水平有限，所以所有翻译内容，都是粗糙的“编译”，难以做到信达雅，请谅解。错误一定不少，恳请指教，多谢

原文中有不少精品，但也决非篇篇精彩，有些甚至显然是胡搅蛮缠，但作为外邦对俺中华经济的评价，必然有其价值，这个自不待言。

这个系列以提供资源为主，个人观点不多，但希望能抛砖引玉，引出朋友们的精彩见解。

至于选材，主要是网上都能看到、又没有中文版的的外文重要报刊，特别是经济报刊，所以华尔街日报和金融时报就没有了。首先推出香港《亚洲时报》，此报很关注中国经济，稿源挺杂，多种观点都有出现，有些很有意思。网址为www.atimes.com，首页有中文版链接，但俺一直进不去，如果哪位朋友知道怎么进去，还望指教，俺就不做这个了。

mmdzz

原文链接
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/IF22Dj02.html


提要

此文以希腊神话里的一种说法开头：天神要惩罚狂妄粗鲁的凡人，一种好方法就是满足他们的无度欲望。并暗示，布什的对华贸易政策就像这么个粗人。

以下分三部分：

第一部分（西方国债收益率大幅攀升，标准理论难解释），指出近几个月全球金融市场中一种重要现象：各大工业国长期国债收益率飙升，并指出经济增长加速推动利率上升的标准理论难以解释这种现象。指出此现象别有原因。

第二部分（布雷顿森林体系2代；美中贸易逆差问题），话题一转，先埋汰一把小布什：在世界经济主导权由美国转向中国期间无所作为的美国总统，他所做的只是把数千亿美元扔进伊拉克这个血腥熔炉里，这将是历史对小布什的评价。

而后切入正题：美中合理打造了第2代布雷顿森林体系：人民币钉住美元，由此决定了美国对华贸易逆差，中国把顺差投资到美国国债，锁定了这种格局。美国得消费，等等，中国得就业，等等。皆大欢喜。

但史无前例的贸易赤字总不是好东西，小布什的做法是归罪中国，让中国买美国货。中国顺水推舟（照应题目），但并非原样照办，究竟怎样？见下文。

第三部分（主权财富基金；中国投资转移），话题又一转，指出全球金融市场上的新力量――主权财富基金（sovereign wealth funds，SWFs），认为其影响力将远超过震撼市场的对冲基金。那么其意义何在？原来面对美国的压力，中国要买的不是美国产品（其实是俺想买的你不卖），而是组建SWF，大举向美国国债之外投资。那么其影响何在？原文认为将产生广泛影响，其分析很有意思，有兴趣不妨读一读。

点评

美国对华贸易政策是个热点话题，但多数分析都集中在贸易政策本身上面。本文则以美中贸易为着眼点，以金融方面的影响为立足点，从中美出发，最终讨论全球影响，用不长的篇幅，比较系统地论述了一类代表性观点。

不过，作者显然是布黑（仿“姚黑”），把美国贸易政策的荒唐之处都归罪给他。其实相比美国国会，布什政府的对华经济政策要理智得多。我们不妨把“布什”换成“美国”，这就比较符合事实了。

原文的分析颇为有趣，值得一读。这里要指出的是，中国外储投资转变对美国国债市场的影响也是个热点。有人认为影响很大，有人声称根本没影响，究竟怎样，本文第三部分提供了一些比较具体的证据，较有价值，请看摘译。

此文有一些值得注意的重要观点

－－美国对中国的要求过于贪婪粗暴，中国是有求必应，但却没有依照美国希望的方式－－美国要求中国买自己的产品，中国买的却是美国的企业和股票。

－－中国的抛售对美国国债收益率具有实质性影响。

－－中国外汇储备投资的转移，及其带动的主权财富基金投资热潮可能在全球股市中制造泡沫，从而引发全球经济走势的逆转。

以上几点构成了一个因果链，美国施压，要求中国增加进口美国产品－－中国转移投资，大规模投资于股市－－中国的投资转移造成全球债市大跌和股市高涨，而股市泡沫的破裂最终导致全球经济衰退。

而这条因果链的起点，是布什在贸易问题上对华施压。

摘译

One TIC data set of particular interest to bond players is just how great the investment in US government securities by foreign governments is each month. These numbers are the core of the flows that constitute Bretton Woods 2, for they derive mostly from US dollar reserves held at foreign central banks.
对债券投资者而言，TIC报告中一项极为重要的数据是每个月外国政府对美国国债的投资额。在构成第2代布雷顿森林体系的资金流量中，这项数据是核心所在，因为其来源主要是外国央行的美元储备。

They've been falling, too. From averaging more than $6 billion a month in 2006, foreign government purchases of US Treasury have fallen to average just over $1 billion a month for the first four months of 2007.
这项数据也在下降。2006年，外国政府平均每个月对美国国债的投资额超过60亿美元，到2007年1－4月，平均投资额已降至略高于10亿美元的水平。

It is of course far from coincidental that, when US Treasury 10-year notes were at their lows in yield, in mid-2005, TIC data were showing foreign flows into Treasuries at their highest. The central reality of the bond market is that the yield of bonds traded in it go down as more people buy them; more important for the current moment, yields go up as fewer people buy them.
有一个事实绝非巧合：2005年年中，10年期美国国债的收益率处于低点，而TIC数据表明，与此同时，外国对美国国债的投资正处于顶点。债券市场的基本机制就在于，如果债券购买量超过出售量，债券价格就会上升，而收益率将下降；反过来，如果购买量少于出售量，那么价格将下降，收益率将上升，而今就属于这种情况。

The US Treasury will not release May TIC data until mid-July, but there are indications that suggest that is precisely what is happening here. A recent Treasury auction of new 10-year notes had the lowest rate of foreign government purchase participation in years. On some financial trader blogs it is being noticed that, on many days during the current market rout, the US Treasury market has opened, at 8:20am New York Time (when the Treasury futures markets open in Chicago), with large order imbalances to the sell side.
5月号TIC报告要7月中旬才能发布，但一些动向已经能够清楚地表明当前的情况。美国财政部最近一次拍卖10年期国债时，外国政府的参与率是近年来最低的。一些交易商的博客中指出，在本次债市大跌期间，美国国债市场在纽约时间早晨8：20开盘时，卖出订单数常常远超过买入订单数。

The speculation here is that this results from Chinese sellers putting in big sell orders before they retire for the night (Shanghai time is 12 hours ahead of New York) so they can see whether, or how significantly, their orders moved the market.
有人猜测，这是因为上海的时间比纽约早12个小时，因此美国债市上的巨额卖出订单来自中国操作人员在下班前发出的卖出订单。他们这样做，就可以观察其订单能否影响市场，或是能够对市场产生多大影响。

Of particular significance to the future is the connection between SWFs and interest rates. On May 21, China's still-nascent SWF announced its first prospective investment; it was going to take a $3 billion stake in the upcoming initial public offering of the Blackstone Group, the huge US private equity buyout firm (I wrote about the current mania for private equity in my February 22 article The highs and lows of buyouts). It was after that announcement that the fiercest selling befell the world's Treasury markets, as if traders suddenly realized that the long-feared prospect of Asian central banks abandoning bonds for other investments was finally coming true.
对美国利率的走势而言，主权财富基金与利率之间的关系具有至关重要的意义。5月21日，尚未组建完毕的中国主权财富基金宣布，其第一项投资将是向美国私人股权收购公司黑石集团投资30亿美元。正是在中国宣布这项消息之后，美国国债市场上出现了最猛烈的抛售大潮，交易者似乎意识到，亚洲央行抛弃美国国债、转向其他投资的转变正在由市场的担忧变为现实。

mmdzz

Jun 22, 2007

Careful what you wish for, China may grant it
By Julian Delasantellis

In Greek mythology, one of the most effective methods the gods used to punish impudent and hubristic humans was to grant them their most fervent desires.

Inevitably, the weak and feckless mortals would find that getting everything they ever desired would lead to their total ruination, as befell King Midas when granted the wish to have everything he touched turn to gold. The implicit lesson to be learned from these stories was that mortals must temper their wishes and desires, lest they suffer the same fate.

Is the administration of US President George W Bush learning the same fate as regards its trading policy with China?

第1部分：西方大国国债收益率全面大幅攀升，标准理论难解释

The big news currently roiling the financial markets is the rapid rise in yields for long-term government bonds issued by the world's major industrial powers. The benchmark US Treasury 10-year note has risen 0.85 percentage points in yield, from 4.50% to almost 5.35% (in bond trader lingo, that's 85 "basis points") from early March to early June, with most of that rise coming since just late May. This represents the highest level of US 10-year rates since 2002.

Other major-traded government debt issuances have risen in yield (and thus fallen in price) along with US notes. After yielding about 1% for the better part of a decade, Japanese government bonds have risen more than 50 basis points over the same period to yield just under 2% now. British government bonds, called gilts, have risen 70 basis points.

Euro bonds, called "bunds" (from their origins as debt obligations of the German Federal Republic, the Bundesrepublik) have also risen more than 80 basis points since late winter. There is concern that these interest rate hikes, by raising the price of investment capital, will finally act to cool down the current white-hot global economy.

In my March 6 article Rocking the subprime house of cards, I explained how the issue of causation, of "why" something happens in the financial markets, is frequently hard to answer, especially when analyzing something other than individual stocks. This is the case with the current government-debt rout.

When bond-market investors hand over their money to buy a government bond they have to hold for an extended period of time, be it one, five, 10 or 30 years, they want to be confident that inflation will not eat away at the purchasing power of what they will receive back at the bond's expiration. If they think that might be the case, they will demand higher interest rates of return before forking over their wealth.

However, in this case, the standard explanations/conventional wisdom for rising interest rates, a spreading market perception among bond investors that economic growth is accelerating, soon to be followed upon by rising inflation, don't seem to have been sufficient to have engendered interest-rate rises this high this quick.

US economic growth for the January-May period was a measly 0.6%, the slowest rate since late 2002. As the US economy gets pulled down by the heavy weight of the subprime mortgage crisis (explored in my March 6 article, as well as in my March 16 article The subprime dominoes in motion), recent reports are showing that growth has not merely slowed in the US real-estate sector, it is now in full-throttle reverse, as some localized real-estate markets are showing double-digit average price declines from last year.

The problems in the real-estate sector, along with the fact that anemic sales reports from many US retailers seem to be indicating that the once super-avaricious US consumer seems finally to have been banished from the malls by high energy prices, do not seem to portend the rapidly accelerating economic growth that could be causing the rising government-bond yields, neither in the United States nor in the other major industrial capitalist economies.

The "economic growth causing rising rates" argument is not confirmed by certain internal market indicators, either. There are three major traded instruments that professional traders watch to see if inflationary fears are seeping into the markets. These are the so-called "TIPS spread" (the difference between standard Treasury bond yields and newer, inflation-indexed TIPS - Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities - bonds), the price of gold, and the levels of various commodity basket indices.

You would expect the prices of all three to be appreciating should inflationary fears be spreading, but, surprisingly, all three have in essence been stable to minimally higher throughout the worldwide bond-market rout. Something has been causing the recent rising bond yields, and it has nothing to do with the conventional wisdom.

第2部分

2、1 美中合力造就第2代布雷顿森林体系

It may not seem so now, but in the future, George W Bush will probably go down foremost in history as the US president who sat by with his cowboy boots up on the table (as he shoveled what will probably turn out to be the better part of a trillion dollars into the bloody furnace called Iraq) as world economic dominance passed from the US to China.

At first, the corporate elite class that put its man in the White House probably thought the rise in Chinese economic power was at least serendipitous, since its main cause, US manufacturers offshoring production to China, was putting intense pressure on wages; this is a central factor in the fact that a proportion of US national income going to owners of capital (business and stock owners), as against labor, has now skewed dramatically in favor of capital.

No one saw it at the time, but a central manifestation of the freedom revolution that spread across the world upon the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was that First World employers were now free to put their employees in an employment pool to compete for their jobs with about a billion other employees from nations with much lower standards of living, especially China and India. Wages might be being pressured downward, but on the other side of the seesaw, profits were soaring.

As economists Lawrence Mishel and Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute put it, "Over prior business cycles, profits (including interest income) have accounted for 23% of the growth in corporate-sector income, on average, with total compensation accounting for the remaining 77%. In the current business cycle, the distribution is almost reversed: profits have claimed nearly 70% of total growth in the corporate sector, while increases in compensation (from increased employment and higher hourly compensation) have received just over 30% of total income growth."

This is the dynamic that has fueled China's explosive recent economic progress, with first-quarter year-over-year economic growth a more than healthy (in fact, a rather inflationary) world-leading 11.1% rise in gross domestic product. The GDP growth rate has been in double-digit territory since early 2005; figures for industrial production growth, currently at 18.1% year over year, also lead the world. This growth is far and away export-led; Chinese internal consumption, while growing steadily, is a very small part of the story of the Chinese economic miracle. In May, China reported a $22.5 billion trade surplus, up 73% from the previous year. More than half of that trading surplus is with the United States.

Naturally, this has resulted in a tremendous shift of wealth from the US to China. Chinese economic officials would not allow this tremendous surge of First World wealth to be loosed upon a Third World economy, with the limited domestic consumption opportunities of the Third World. It was feared, probably correctly, that this tremendous wave of cash hitting the underdeveloped markets for domestically traded goods would cause a dramatic spike in inflation.

Therefore, the Chinese have decided to let most of their export proceeds rest comfortably as reserves, currently at a world-topping $1.2 trillion (growing at a rate of a billion dollars a day), at the central People's Bank of China.

When, as World War II drew to a close, it became obvious that a new international financial architecture would be needed to fund the postwar world, allied financial chiefs gathered at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to hammer out what became known as the Bretton Woods accords.

These replaced the gold-centered prewar international financial structure with fixed exchange rates focused around the US dollar. When this system collapsed in the early 1970s, it led to the introduction of the current system of variable, market-derived exchange rates. In this system, the currencies of countries that run large trade surpluses, such as the China, were supposed to appreciate in value, thus making it cheaper for their citizens to purchase imports; countries that ran big trade deficits, such as the US, would see their currencies fall in value so that, eventually, they would not be able to afford so many imports.

Like the water levels in the opened locks of a canal, eventually, the system intended that the countries with trade surpluses and deficits would see their numbers equalize, and the system would eventually balance itself without any government intervention.

This has not happened with the Chinese/US trading relationship of this decade. The Chinese currency, the yuan, does not "float" in value, as do such currencies as the euro or pound. For many years it was fixed at a rate of about 8 yuan to the dollar (meaning that each individual yuan was worth 12.5 cents). Over the past year or so, it has been allowed to rise to 7.62 yuan per dollar, meaning that each individual yuan has gone up all the way to be now worth 13.1 US cents.

This meager yuan appreciation is not nearly enough to reverse Chinese trade surpluses, which are still growing. Instead, a new international financial architecture seems to have developed, one that economists Nouriel Roubini and Brad Setser, on their weblog RGE Monitor, call Bretton Woods 2.

Here's how Bretton Woods 2 works. China (or the other, lesser players in this game, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea) does not sell its export-earned dollars. Rather, it banks them. Without this excess selling pressure, the dollar does not fall in value against the yuan; it remains stable, which allows American consumers to continue their monthly billion-dollar overseas spending spree. Chinese factories keep humming, employment is strong, the Chinese people are far too content buying new stuff to come out to protest again at Tiananmen Square, and China's Communist Party rulers are very happy about that.

This is much like what happened with the billions of petrodollars that were raised by oil-exporting countries after the oil-price rises of the 1970s. The billions of dollars of China's current export earnings get sent back to the US, mostly to be invested in Treasury securities. This keeps dollar interest rates, including mortgage rates, lower than they would have been, and this keeps the US economy humming and the consumer, still fat, dumb and happy, flush with cash and plastic to keep the cycle going for at least one more round.

2、2 贸易逆差博弈――美国怪罪中国，中国顺水推舟

But no human agency or endeavor lasts forever. The internal contradictions of Bretton Woods 1 caused it to fall, and the same seems to be happening with Bretton Woods 2. Specifically, what if China doesn't want 1.2 trillion in US dollar reserves?

Bretton Woods 2 greatly benefited Bush administration officials, by both pressuring wage rates to help out their business buddies and spurring the economic growth that got them re-elected in 2004. Still, it is somewhat embarrassing to be the president of the nation with the most massive trade deficits in history. Like spoiled rich kids since time immemorial, the Bush administration is blaming somebody else.

The administration, along with its mouthpieces in the corporate conservative media machine, is arguing that, even with a huge budget deficit and virtually non-existent national savings, the trade deficit is not America's fault. It's not that the US is spending too much and saving too little, it's that the surplus countries, especially China, are saving too much and spending too little.

This interpretation of savings as bad is certainly new in the working theory of capitalist economies; in classical economics, savings are a very good thing, since the market can direct them to future investments that will maintain economic growth. A rough parallel would be an inebriate claiming that he doesn't have a problem, it's the rest of the world that suffers from inadequate alcohol consumption syndrome.

But in business, the customer is right even when he's not, and the United States is now far and away China's biggest customer. For example, it is now estimated that up to 70% of Wal-Mart's inventory is of Chinese origin; a remarkable turnaround for a company that until this decade broadcast advertisements that trumpeted the red, white and blue all-American manufacture of its products. Wal-Mart's current trade with China alone, estimated at more than $25 billion a year, surpasses the GDP of the smallest 112 national economies of the world.

In letting the yuan appreciate, although maddeningly slowly, China is responding to demands for action from US officials, especially in Congress. Another demand is that China stop just letting its huge stash of foreign-currency reserves sit around earning interest. They should go out and buy American stuff, preferably goods and services, so that the trade balance can start to equalize.

But as the Greek gods warned, be very careful what you wish for.

第3部分

3、1 主权财富基金异军突起

In my July 6, 2006, article Hedge funds: Playing dice with the universe, I explained how hedge funds, very lightly regulated pools of private capital used as high-octane investment vehicles to the world's supranational moneyed elite, were having more and more impact on events in the world's financial markets. I postulated that hedge funds acting in unison may have been a prime cause of the May 2006 cross-border equity-market meltdown. It was estimated then that, collectively, the thousands of the world's hedge funds had more than $1 trillion in assets under management.

That's just about what the single personage of Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of the People's Bank of China, has at his disposal for investment from foreign-exchange reserves.

Last year, the big chatter in the world's financial markets was over the growing power of hedge funds, and how their huge concentrated financial resources had the possibility of dwarfing any or all governments' ability to regulate national markets. This year, a new specter haunts the markets, one whose potential impact on markets far exceeds the puny $1 trillion-plus that the hedge funds have at their disposal.

They're called sovereign wealth funds (SWFs). Basically, it seems that many of the countries that lately have accumulated huge foreign-exchange reserves exporting to the United States are getting bored with just having their money sit around earning interest at US Treasury rates. China and the other big exporters, which until recently were seemingly happy at lending back to the US the dollars to continue to buy their stuff, now see the need to earn greater rates of return than the 5% that US Treasuries currently earn.

Many of them are facing demographic time-bombs consisting of their growing elderly populations needing eventual pension support, and, for all the glamour and glitz of today's Shanghai, going beyond China's big cities still reveals grinding rural poverty that the central government knows it must address.

SWFs will act as super-hedge funds, in that they will look for opportunities all across the investment spectrum. China is in the process of setting up its own SWF, which reportedly will be funded with some $300 billion of reserves.

And that's $300 billion that will not make its way into the market for Treasury securities.

3、2 债市，股市，全球经济――中国投资转变的深远影响

In my March 24, 2006, article US living on borrowed time - and money, I introduced readers to the US Treasury's monthly TIC (Treasury International Capital) report, the data that enumerate just how much foreign capital the US is importing every month to finance its extravagant lifestyle. During much of 2005, the US was net-importing more than $100 billion of investment capital every month, but the bottom line net number is falling sharply; last December, the US actually failed to attract any capital at all.

One TIC data set of particular interest to bond players is just how great the investment in US government securities by foreign governments is each month. These numbers are the core of the flows that constitute Bretton Woods 2, for they derive mostly from US dollar reserves held at foreign central banks.

They've been falling, too. From averaging more than $6 billion a month in 2006, foreign government purchases of US Treasury have fallen to average just over $1 billion a month for the first four months of 2007.

It is of course far from coincidental that, when US Treasury 10-year notes were at their lows in yield, in mid-2005, TIC data were showing foreign flows into Treasuries at their highest. The central reality of the bond market is that the yield of bonds traded in it go down as more people buy them; more important for the current moment, yields go up as fewer people buy them.

If China has sharply curtailed its US Treasury purchases, unless other buyers step up to the plate, then Treasury securities prices have nowhere to go but down, and yields have nowhere to go but up - just as they have recently.

The US Treasury will not release May TIC data until mid-July, but there are indications that suggest that is precisely what is happening here. A recent Treasury auction of new 10-year notes had the lowest rate of foreign government purchase participation in years. On some financial trader blogs it is being noticed that, on many days during the current market rout, the US Treasury market has opened, at 8:20am New York Time (when the Treasury futures markets open in Chicago), with large order imbalances to the sell side.

The speculation here is that this results from Chinese sellers putting in big sell orders before they retire for the night (Shanghai time is 12 hours ahead of New York) so they can see whether, or how significantly, their orders moved the market.

Of particular significance to the future is the connection between SWFs and interest rates. On May 21, China's still-nascent SWF announced its first prospective investment; it was going to take a $3 billion stake in the upcoming initial public offering of the Blackstone Group, the huge US private equity buyout firm (I wrote about the current mania for private equity in my February 22 article The highs and lows of buyouts). It was after that announcement that the fiercest selling befell the world's Treasury markets, as if traders suddenly realized that the long-feared prospect of Asian central banks abandoning bonds for other investments was finally coming true.

World equity markets stuttered a bit in the face of the world bond selloff, but they soon recovered their footing and are once again moving up. That should not be surprising; if SWFs are about to pounce on the world's stock markets, that will be unquestionably good news for share prices.

But will it be too much of a good thing? Even with buying support from SWFs, can world stock markets appreciate much further in the face of rising bond yields? Or would continued equity-market appreciation in the face of rising bond yields be prima facie evidence of what Alan Greenspan once called irrational exuberance? Right now the only world stock market that Chinese prosperity is supporting is the Shanghai Stock Exchange A-share exchange.

That market has tripled in 14 months, and academic economists the world over are frightened that when this speculative bubble finally bursts, as all speculative bubbles must inevitably do, it will take the world's economy with it. Specifically, with so many ordinary Chinese citizens playing the Shanghai market like a never-losing roulette wheel, will the Chinese government feel threatened by the rapid destruction of domestic wealth that a burst stock market would cause? Will they try to support the shares with reserves, either from the People's Bank of China or from its SWF? What will that do to the investments in the West that the reserves had been supporting?

A more frightening prospect is if non-China stock markets start acting like Shanghai - if SWF money starts supporting or, more likely, deluging them. Trading volumes in Shanghai are still small enough, compared with Western equity markets, that the Chinese government probably could backstop a Shanghai crash, but if the world's other stock markets, supported by Asian SWF money, start replicating Shanghai's parabolic, meteoric rise, then all the reserves, tea, or anything else in China will not be sufficient to support them when their towers finally topple.

This decade's boom started in China. Will it end there too?

Will the economic historians of the future, when tracking back to ascertain the cause of the world crash of 2007, find that the dominoes were put in motion when George W Bush started urging the Chinese to buy more American stuff, and the Chinese responded with purchases of US companies and stocks?

Like the Sorcerer's Apprentice of legend, perhaps it would have been better if, while an business-administration graduate student at Harvard in the early 1970s, the future president would have actually read the instructions on how to run the world economy.

Julian Delasantellis is a management consultant, private investor and educator in international business in the US state of Washington. He can be reached at juliandelasantellis@yahoo.com.

mmdzz

提要

开篇提出问题

中国的造假业取得了很大成功，而且范围极广，连伪造的恐龙化石都可以骗倒世界顶级专家。

要解释其原因，不应该将其解释为中国文化的独特产物，而应该寻找其客观的经济动力。

笔锋一转，讨论召回事件，埋个伏笔

近年来，跨国公司大举向中国转移生产，与此相应，出现了大规模召回产品的事件，原因是什么？

然后是对造假业发达的经济分析

首先，在中国廉价劳动力的吸引下，全球制造业企业大规模向中国转移其生产，相应的技术资本也在向中国转移，而廉价劳动力和技术资本的结合同样可以为有组织犯罪集团所利用。

第二，在制造环节和技术资本大规模向中国转移的同时，营销、风险管理等其他环节及相应资本却没有相应的转移，这种情况下，技术资本的回报率不断下降，其他资本的回报率则保持高水平，因此中国企业不满足于仅仅作为西方企业的承包商，而希望生产那些既包含技术环节、也包含其他环节的产品。

第三，有组织犯罪集团无需承担保护品牌、开发知识产权的成本，因此有能力开出高工资，并吸引技术资源；由于技术资本回报过低，因此中国企业希望发展其他环节，获取高回报，但外国技术资本仍在中国经济中处于支配性地位，因此中国企业自创品牌的风险过大。这种情况下，许多中国企业的最佳选择是搭便车，与有组织犯罪活动结合，伪造品牌产品。

最后，照应前文伏笔，总结全文

跨国公司在华生产的产品之所以质量不高，其实和中国假货质量差一样，是因为在华生产虽然具备了技术资本和劳动力，但缺少其他资本。

总结：中国的产业发展方向――发展高价值流程；中国制假只是经济全球化的一个缩影。

点评

中国造假业如今是个热点，在媒体的文章里面，亚洲时报这篇可算是很出色的一篇，对中国人格外有借鉴意义。作者立意很高――要看透造假问题，归结为文化、民族性格之类因素没啥意思，那只能流于肤浅，而且常常演变成对中国的谩骂（外人），或对祖国的厌弃（中国人）。问题是，谩骂能改变什么？厌弃自己的祖国有什么意义？

真正需要的是解决问题！要解决问题，看透问题无疑是很重要的。关于中国造假问题，此文的分析相当漂亮，文中的经济逻辑颇为精致，而且布局谋篇也比较讲究，无论是对此问题感兴趣，还是想借鉴其分析方法，都不妨一读。

注：作者是加纳人，好像是黑人。

mmdzz

By Bright B Simons

They even fake dinosaurs.

The counterfeit epidemic sweeping China is close to getting out of hand, if it hasn't already. Nothing adds color to this view better than the hoard upon hoard of fake fossils being carted out of China daily for sale to natural-history exhibitors in the West; the counterfeit prehistoric remnants are so good even top experts in the trade and their scientific consultants are fooled.

There is something a bit geeky about faking dinosaur remains. One may even, tongue in cheek, concede that it spices up a rather dull industry. But as everybody by now knows, China's master forgers don't stick to Jurassic sculptures. Their hand has been discerned, directly or indirectly, in the death of at least 200,000 of their own countrymen - that's an annual count for the only year, 2001, for which a comprehensive estimate is available - from fake medicines.

In fact, they appear to have very bad taste: they will forge anything. US authorities reckon that at least four out of every five fake items on sale in the West can be traced back to the smart guys in the southern province of Guangdong and elsewhere in China.

So why are these guys so good? Why are concerted efforts to clamp down on their nefarious activities resulting in their simply moving to diversify their expertise? What accounts for their remarkable success?

It is much too easy just to put it all down to the deep roots of organized criminal behavior in clan culture through the ancient codes of the triads. After all, the question resembles another oft-asked one: Why is the Sicilian mafia so resilient? In that context, amateur sociologists will feel drawn to notions of "alternative moral systems" and a "culture of crime" perpetuated through unusually dense family networks, such that, perhaps, the counterfeit situation in China could be nailed down to a case of "cultural pathology".

Some even go further, to conflate the counterfeit phenomenon with other widely perceived, deviant social trends in China, such as rampant exam cheating, the avalanche of fake professional credentials, generally lax enforcement of standards in public life, and what is said to be a growing cynicism among, especially, youth about law and order. Those who hold such views of course assert that while, admittedly, none of these perceptions can be confined to observations of Chinese society, they are nevertheless exceptionally pronounced in China's contemporary experience.

Who is to say, though? Any basis for comparing societies to one another that relies on such subjective criteria as the rate of cynicism among youth, public integrity and implicit accusations of a culture of graft or corruption must be asserted rather than evidenced.

If one is, however, looking for an objective set of contributory factors to the growth of the counterfeit phenomenon in China, it will probably be more prudent to search in other, more evidence-laden directions.

Some time ago, the author of this article conducted a non-scientific study that established highly suggestive links between abrupt or massive transfers by major manufacturers of production capacity from their original production sites to newly - one must hesitate to say "hastily" - set-up platforms in China and subsequent mass recall of products. The correlations were less robust when the analysis was broadened to cover East Asia, immediately prompting caution about any inference that outsourcing per se is the most interesting feature in the scene.

Yet still a number of the most intriguing correlations make the temptation hard to resist.

Ever since Sony began expanding its plants in the central east-coast province of Jiangsu, somewhat mirroring Hitachi-Maxell's mass shift of its lithium-ion battery-manufacturing processes to China, and started to move more of its production capacity from Japan to China, that company has been plagued with one recall problem after the other. So also has Matsushita, owner of Panasonic.

Canon, in 2005, made the decision to shift most of its production from its Japanese plants to Jiangsu, breaking a long relationship with Italy's Olivetti SpA. The following year it recalled an unprecedented 140,000 copiers.

LG Philips' dramatic expansion of its LCD (liquid crystal display) fabrication plants in China in 2004 was followed in 2006 by massive recalls of tens of thousands of flat-panel televisions.

Motorola took action in 2001 to transfer a huge range of its manufacturing processes to Tianjin municipality in northeastern China. In 2002, the company began issuing recalls for millions of products.

In 2004, the California technology company Xilinx begun a complex sourcing and investment process that portended a shifting of parts of its central supply chains from Taiwan to mainland China, and even anticipated a physical manufacturing presence in the latter. In 2006 the company began to backtrack amid massive recalls of some of its Spartan 3 brands, most of which by this time contained Chinese components after a switch by Xilinx from IBM suppliers.

To repeat: the study cited above was unscientific. As any amateur sociologist worth his or her salt will concede, establishing a causative link is a task equivalent to cleaning the Aegean stables, and often one just as mucky. However, the study did take into account the company histories of the actors mentioned above with regards to product recalls before and after substantial transfers of productive capacity to China, and did discover a troubling upsurge in recall activity after transfer of major processes to China.

But what has all this to do with counterfeiting? A lot, but by implication rather than connection. At the time of the study cited above, the chief insight was that insufficient due diligence had often preceded the transfers of those levels of industrial capacity to China, and the product recalls were hence a result of an inability of the firms involved, most of them global players, to readjust their command and control structures to handle the emerging shape of their sprawling global supply lines.

China, in this view, had become a millstone around the neck of these webby knots of supply lines, its enormous weight distending their frame and weakening their elasticity. Too much had gone to China too fast is the pithiest way to put the point.

With hindsight it is clear that that analysis was a tad too simplistic. Too much has indeed gone to China too fast. But the implications of that development in global economics are plainly multifold, and definitely not limited to the strains on global supply-chain integration for major manufacturing actors as indicated in the perspective above.

First, the minor points. One, it does not take much imagination to see that the advantages of the cheap skilled labor that draws Western firms into China, and allows them to produce nearly half the world's manufacturing output within an economy that yields a gross domestic product (GDP) per capita equivalent to that of some developing Latin American country, will also be available to organized criminal networks based anywhere on the globe.

Two, as more of the technical aspects of production shift to China and technical capital thus accumulates in the country, it is natural to expect that returns to that technical capital will fall. This is happening even as allied processes such as marketing, legal, financial, risk management and design continue to stay put in the West, or at any rate are not being transferred anywhere as rapidly as technical processes are. Meanwhile these allied processes are recording continued increasing returns to investment. It is to be expected that, given these circumstances, the Chinese entrepreneur will seek to diversify away from technical investments.

The major points thus are: first, organized criminal networks, unencumbered by the costs of brand protection and intellectual-property development, are likely to be able to pay more for skilled labor and thus attract the technical resources to enable them to compete with Western manufacturers - hence the sophistication of counterfeits. Second, the low returns to technical investment, evident in the shrinking margins of contract manufacturing for Western multinationals, mean that the Chinese entrepreneur will diversify toward finished goods embodying both technical and allied processes.

The continued domination of foreign technical capital in the Chinese economy, however, means that it is only the most naive - or conversely the most brilliant or endowed - Chinese entrepreneurs who can risk the travails of building indigenous brands to compete as aforesaid. Faced with this classic entrepreneurial challenge, Chinese entrepreneurs are simply allying with criminal elements to fake established brands or piggyback their generics on these brands as a way of cutting risk.
The same paucity of other forms of capital beside the technical will be equally detrimental to the quality of genuine brands as it will be to counterfeit brands, but that is peripheral to the main issue, which is that there is a higher demand in China for entrepreneurial opportunities beyond making to order. And in the intervening period between now and when high-value processes, along with the better-paying jobs, such as aforementioned, follow the technical shift out of the West to China, Chinese entrepreneurs and their criminal allies will be content to make do.

Rather than seeing the proliferation of counterfeit goods in China as owing to some peculiar cultural phenomenon, observers simply need to pay attention to the differential rates of return to various forms of capital in an economy that has become a giant microcosm of the entire global productive economy.

Bright B Simons is a research fellow at the Ghanaian think-tank IMANI, the Center for Humane Education, Accra.

mmdzz

提要

放开人民币汇率没有危险

如果让供求决定人民币汇率，中国的金融体系并不会更脆弱，因为中国贸易顺差庞大，且资本流入规模巨大，因此目前全球的人民币需求大大超过其供给。

维持人民币汇率代价巨大

维持当前的人民币汇率给中国造成了多方面压力。

1、人行必须吸纳外汇，卖出人民币，为避免通胀压力，又需要发行央行票据回笼货币。这种做法造成了出口型制造业的过度投资，过度的城市发展，刺激了中国的股市泡沫和国际油价高涨。

2、这些都造成了社会性支出不足，恶化了收入不平等。

3、造成美国等国制造业工作岗位的减少。

指责布什政府

布什政府和中国配合密切，给要求中国“开放”汇率的美国人贴上了“保护主义”的标签。

人民币升值该怎样操作

如果中国一次性让人民币大幅升值，就会失信于投资者。

中国可以按照本国竞争力的提高让人民币逐步升值，并公开宣布人民币升值的速度，从而让投资者放心。


点评

本文虽短，但观点很有代表性，比较全面的表达了国外要求人民币升值的理由。其中不乏可参考之处，但偏见也很明显。

总体来说，本文用很短的篇幅，很漂亮地展示了貌似公正、客观的经济学家可以怎样信口开河。这倒也有好处――说明不能轻易相信什么专家，人，尤其是专家，往往是为利益说话的，不然没人给他工钱。

随便说说，比如，中国城市发展过度吗？中国的城市化率才多少？希望过上舒适城里生活的中国农村居民只会嫌城市还不够大，就业机会还不够多。

中国储蓄高是因为人民币汇率吗？几十年来中国的储蓄率一直是世界最高的之一，越来越高是因为社会保障不足。

油价高涨是因为人民币汇率吗？24小时有热水洗澡、家家户户有私车是3亿美国人给60多亿地球人立下的生活水平标杆。只要所有人和美国人一样有权追求高质量、高能耗的物质生活，只要发展中国家越来越富有，油价总会水涨船高。

政府社会支出不足、居民社会保障不足是因为人民币汇率吗？美国制造业就业下降是因为人民币汇率吗？……

mmdzz

By Peter Morici

Not since the United States floated the dollar in the 1970s and threw the Bretton Woods system on the scrap heap of history has the management of exchange rates so captured the attention of economists and national politicians as China's undervalued yuan does now.

Then, as now, all manner of polemics and the weight of established authority argued that governments should manage currency-exchange rates, much as they attempt to fix prices, for example of sugar or petroleum, supposedly to serve the greater good.

We hear about China's weak financial system, the pent-up demand for US dollars in China, and the need for exchange-rate stability in developing countries. However, we should always be wary when professors, who enjoy the absolute protection of tenure, and corporate leaders and bankers, whose investments benefit from government meddling in markets, argue that prices should be regulated in the public interest.

China's financial system would be no more rickety or vulnerable if the exchange for the yuan were maintained at a level more consistent with underlying supply and demand in foreign-exchange markets.

As things stand, thanks to China's huge trade surplus and inward foreign investment, the international demand for its currency, the yuan, greatly exceeds the supply. To limit market appreciation to less than 5% a year, Chinese monetary authorities print yuan to purchase US dollars and other hard currencies valued at about US$300 billion annually. Otherwise, the value of the yuan against the dollar would rise at least 40% to about 4.5 from its current rate of about 7.6 per dollar.

In turn, Chinese authorities purchase US Treasuries and other securities to earn interest on their hoard, and sell yuan-denominated bonds domestically to soak up the excess liquidity these yuan sales create and head off inflation. This increases Chinese savings and transfers purchasing power to, and lower savings in, the United States.

Through this process, Beijing encourages overinvestment in manufacturing export industries and excessive urban development, stokes a speculative bubble in China's stock market, and provokes inflation in global oil markets. (Manufacturers in China use energy much less efficiently than do competitors making similar products in the West.)

All this causes underinvestment in Chinese domestic needs, such as decent sanitation and clean water in rural areas, and exacerbates income inequality that undermines the social stability the Communist Party so earnestly seeks to preserve.

These processes also exacerbate job losses in manufacturing and widen economic inequality in the US and other industrialized countries, thereby undermining political support for the World Trade Organization system of free trade that has so benefited China's economic progress.

One of the curious accomplishments of the administration of US President George W Bush and other defenders of this alchemy has been to label as "protectionists" US critics who advocate a market-determined yuan. What a novel idea for a Republican administration - campaigning for free currency markets is a protectionist conspiracy!

Equally remarkable, these defenders of rigged markets have enlisted the conservative press to ridicule anyone who proposes meaningful US responses to the harmful effects of Chinese mercantilism on the US economy.

Clearly, it would ease Sino-US relations if China revalued the yuan to, say, 6 or 6.5 per dollar. But once China revalued substantially, its policy of woefully slow yuan appreciation would no longer be credible among investors. Pressure to keep revaluing the yuan upward would be incessant.

Right now, thanks to the yuan peg and inward investment, China must purchase US dollars and other currencies at a pace equal to 10% of its gross domestic product and about 25% of its exports. That requires Beijing to work quite hard to find enough domestic investors to purchase yuan-denominated bonds to increase domestic savings by that amount and head off a bout of liquidity-driven inflation. The policy would collapse if the government could no longer sell ever larger amounts of yuan-denominated bonds to recapture all the yuan it prints to buy dollars and other hard currencies.

A stated policy of revaluing the peg to a level that does not require persistent one-sided intervention through large purchases of dollars would be credible and welcomed. Revaluing, for example by 10%, initially, and then permitting the yuan to rise 2% against the dollar each month, until one-sided intervention was no longer required would satisfy financial markets and permit the necessary adjustments within the Chinese economy to unfold in an orderly fashion.

What investors need to know is what the policy is and that Beijing is moving the exchange rate for the yuan, in a timely fashion, to a value that is consistent with China's growing competitive strengths.

Remember, the exchange rate is nothing but a price. Sooner or later, when a government fixes prices, someone gets hurt. Often, many ordinary working people get hurt the most.

Peter Morici is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Business and former chief economist at the US International Trade Commission.