The Coming Trade War

This article appeared in AToL on June 24, 2005

Global trade has forced all countries to adopt market economy.  Yet the market is not the economy. It is only one aspect of the economy. A market economy can be viewed as an aberration of human civilization, as economist Karl Polanyi (1886-1964) pointed out. The principal theme of Polanyi’s Origins of Our Time: The Great Transformation (1945) was that market economy was of very recent origin and had emerged fully formed only as recently as the 19th century, in conjunction with capitalistic industrialization. The current globalization of markets following the fall of the Soviet bloc is also of recent post-Cold War origin, in conjunction with the advent of the electronic information age and deregulated finance capitalism. A severe and prolonged depression can trigger the end of the market economy, when intelligent human beings are finally faced with the realization that the business cycle inherent in the market economy cannot be regulated sufficiently to prevent its innate destructiveness to human welfare and are forced to seek new economic arrangements for human development.  The principle of diminishing returns will lead people to reject the market economy, however sophisticatedly regulated.

Sovereign Credit and Unemployment

In an economy financed by sovereign credit, labor should be in perpetual shortage, and the price of labor should constantly rise. A vibrant economy is one in which there is a persistent labor shortage and labor enjoys basic, though not monopolistic, pricing power. An economy should expand until a labor shortage emerges and keep expanding through productivity rise to maintain a slight labor shortage. Unemployment is an indisputable sign that the economy is underperforming and should be avoid as an economic plague.

Wages and Profit

And neoclassical economics does not allow the prospect of employers having an objective of raising wages, as Henry Ford did, instead of minimizing wages as current corporate management, such as General Motors, routinely practices.  Henry Ford raised wages to increase profits by selling more cars to workers, while Ford Motors today cuts wages to maximize profit while adding to overcapacity. Therein resides the cancer of market capitalism: falling wages will lead to the collapse of an overcapacity economy. This is why global wage arbitrage is economically destructive unless and until it is structured to raise wages everywhere rather than to keep prices low in the developed economies.  That is done by not chasing after the lowest price made possible by the lowest wages, but by chasing after a bigger market made possible by rising wages.  The terms of global trade need to be restructured to reward companies that aim at raising wages and benefits globally through internationally coordinated transitional government subsidies, rather than the regressive approach of protective tariffs to cut off trade that exploits wage arbitrage. This will enable the low-wage economies to begin to be able to afford the products they produce and to import more products from the high wage economies to move towards balanced trade. Eventually, certainly within a decade, wage arbitrage would cease to be the driving force in global trade as wage levels around the world equalize.  When the population of the developing economies achieves per capita income that matches that in developed economies, the world economy will be rid of the modern curse of overcapacity caused by the flawed neoclassical economics of scarcity. When top executives are paid tens of million of dollars in bonuses to cut wages and worker benefits, it is not fair reward for good management; it is legalized theft.  Executives should only receive bonuses if both profit and wages in their companies rise as a result of their management strategies.

Sovereign Credit and Dollar Hegemony

In an economy that can operate on sovereign credit, free from dollar hegemony, private savings are needed only for private investment that has no clear socially redeeming purpose or value. Savings are deflationary without full employment, as savings reduces current consumption to provide investment to increase future supply. Savings for capital formation serve only the purpose of bridging the gap between new investment and new revenue from rising productivity and increased capacity from the new investment.  With sovereign credit, private savings are not needed for this bridge financing.  Private savings are also not needed for rainy days or future retirement in an economy that has freed itself from the tyranny of the business cycle through planning. Say’s Law of supply creating its own demand is a very special situation that is operative only under full employment, as eminent post-Keynesian economist Paul Davidson has pointed out. Say’s Law ignores a critical time lag between supply and demand that can be fatal to a fast-moving modern economy without demand management. Savings require interest payments, the compounding of which will regressively make any financial system unsustainable by tilting it toward overcapacity caused by overinvestment. The religions forbade usury also for very practical reasons.  Yet interest on money is the very foundation of finance capitalism, held up by the neoclassical economic notion that money is more valuable when it is scarce. Aggregate poverty then is necessary for sound money.  This was what President Reagan meant when he said that there is always going to be poor people.

The Bank of International Finance (BIS) estimated that as of the end of 2004, the notional value of global OTC interest rate derivatives is around $185 trillion, with a market risk exposure of over $5 trillion, which is almost half of US 2004 GDP.  Interest rate derivatives are by far the largest category of structured finance contracts, taking up $185 trillion of the total $250 trillion of notional values. The $185 trillion notional value of interest rate derivatives is 41 times the outstanding value of US Treasury bonds. This means that interest rate volatility will have a disproportioned impact of the global financial system in ways that historical data cannot project.

With the fall of the USSR, US attitude toward the rest of the world changed.  It no longer needs to compete for the hearts and minds of the masses of the Third /Fourth Worlds. So trade has replaced aid. The US has embarked on a strategy to use Third/Fourth-World cheap labor and non-existent environmental regulation to compete with its former Cold War Allies, now industrialized rivals in trade, taking advantage of traditional US anti-labor ideology to outsource low-pay jobs, playing against the strong pro-labor tradition of social welfare in Europe and Japan.  In the meantime, the US pushed for global financial deregulation based on dollar hegemony and emerged as a 500-lb gorilla in the globalized financial market that left the Japanese and Europeans in the dust, playing catch up in an un-winnable game. In the game of finance capitalism, those with capital in the form of fiat money they can print freely will win hands down.

The tool of this US strategy is the privileged role of the dollar as the key reserve currency for world trade, otherwise known as dollar hegemony. Out of this emerges an international financial architecture that does real damage to the actual producer economies for the benefit of the financier economies.  The dollar, instead of being a neutral agent of exchange, has become a weapon of massive economic destruction (WMED) more lethal than nuclear bombs and with more blackmail power, which is exercised ruthlessly by the IMF on behalf of the Washington Consensus. Trade wars are fought through volatile currency valuations. Dollar hegemony enables the US to use its trade deficits as the bait for its capital account surplus.

Foreign direct investment (FDI) under dollar hegemony has changed the face of the international economy. Since the early 1970s, FDI has grown along with global merchandise trade and is the single most important source of capital for developing countries, not net savings or sovereign credit. FDI is mostly denominated in dollars, a fiat currency that the US can produce at will since 1971, or in dollar derivatives such as the yen or the euro, which are not really independent currencies.  Thus FDI is by necessity concentrated in exports related development, mainly destined for US markets or markets that also sell to US markets for dollars with which to provide the return on dollar-denominated FDI. US economic policy is shifting from trade promotion to FDI promotion. The US trade deficit is financed by the US capital account surplus which in turn provides the dollars for FDI in the exporting economies. A trade spat with the EU over beef and bananas, for example, risks large US investment stakes in Europe.  And the suggestion to devalue the dollar to promote US exports is misleading for it would only make it more expensive for US affiliates to do business abroad while making it cheaper for foreign companies to buy dollar assets. An attempt to improve the trade balance, then, would actually end up hurting the FDI balance.  This is the rationale behind the slogan: a strong dollar is in the US national interest.

Between 1996 and 2003, the monetary value of US equities rose around 80% compared with 60% for European and a decline of 30% for Japanese.  The 1997 Asian financial crisis cut Asia equities values by more than half, some as much as 80% in dollar terms even after drastic devaluation of local currencies.  Even though the US has been a net debtor since 1986, its net income on the international investment position has remained positive, as the rate of return on US investments abroad continues to exceed that on foreign investments in the US.  This reflects the overall strength of the US economy, and that strength is derived from the US being the only nation that can enjoy the benefits of sovereign credit utilization while amassing external debt, largely due to dollar hegemony.

In the US, and now also increasingly so in Europe and Asia, capital markets are rapidly displacing banks as both savings venues and sources of funds for corporate finance. This shift, along with the growing global integration of financial markets, is supposed to create promising new opportunities for investors around the globe. Neo-liberals even claim that these changes could help head off the looming pension crises facing many nations. But so far it has only created sudden and recurring financial crises like those that started in Mexico in 1982, then in the UK in 1992, again in Mexico in 1994, in Asia in 1997, and Russia, Brazil, Argentina and Turkey subsequently.

The introduction of the euro has accelerated the growth of the EU financial markets. For the current 25 members of the European Union, the common currency nullified national requirements for pension and insurance assets to be invested in the same currencies as their local liabilities, a restriction that had long locked the bulk of Europe’s long-term savings into domestic assets. Freed from foreign-exchange transaction costs and risks of currency fluctuations, these savings fueled the rise of larger, more liquid European stock and bond markets, including the recent emergence of a substantial euro junk bond market. These more dynamic capital markets, in turn, have placed increased competitive pressure on banks by giving corporations new financing options and thus lowering the cost of capital within euroland. How this will interact with the euro-dollar market is still indeterminate.  Euro-dollars are dollars outside of US borders everywhere and not necessarily Europe, generally pre-taxed and subject to US taxes if they return to US soil or accounts. The term also applies to euro-yens and euro-euros. But the idea of French retirement accounts investing in non-French assets is both distasteful and irrational for the average French worker, particularly if such investment leads to decreased job security in France and jeopardizes the jealously guarded 35-hour work-week with 30 days of paid annual vacation which has been part of French life.

Take the Japanese economy as an example, the world’s largest creditor economy. It holds over $800 billion in dollar reserves in 2005. The Bank of Japan (BoJ), the central bank, has bought over 300 billion dollars with yen from currency markets in the last two years in an effort to stabilize the exchange value of the yen, which continued to appreciate against the dollar. Now, BoJ is faced with a dilemma: continue buying dollars in a futile effort to keep the yen from rising, or sell dollars to try to recoup yen losses on its dollar reserves. Japan has officially pledged not to diversify its dollar reserves into other currencies, so as not to roil currency markets, but many hedge funds expect Japan to soon run out of options.

Now if the BoJ sells dollars at the rate of $4 billion a day, it will take some 200 trading days to get out of its dollar reserves. After the initial 2 days of sale, the remaining unsold $792 billion reserves would have a market value of 20% less than before the sales program began. So the BoJ will suffer a substantial net yen paper loss of $160 billion. If the BoJ continues its sell-dollar program, everyday Y400 billion will leave the yen money supply to return to the BoJ if it sells dollars for yen, or the equivalent in euro if it sells dollars for euro. This will push the dollar further down against the yen or euro, in which case the value of its remaining dollar reserves will fall even further, not to mention a sharp contraction in the yen money supply which will push the Japanese economy into a deeper recession.

If the BoJ sells dollars for gold, two things may happen. There would be not enough sellers because no one has enough gold to sell to absorb the dollars at current gold prices. Instead, while price of gold will rise, the gold market may simply freezes with no transactions. Gold holders will not have to sell their gold; they can profit from gold derivatives on notional values. Also, the reverse market effect that faces the dollar would hit gold.  After two days of Japanese gold buying, everyone would hold on to their gold in anticipation for still higher gold prices.  There would be no market makers. Part of the reason central banks have been leasing out their gold in recent years is to provide liquidity to the gold market.  The second thing that may happen is that price of gold will sky rocket in currency terms, causing a great deflation in gold terms. The US national debt as of June 1, 2005 was $7.787 trillion. US government gold holding is about 261,000,000 ounces. Price of gold required to pay back the national debt with US-held gold is $29,835 per ounce. At that price, an ounce of gold will buy a car. Meanwhile, market price of gold as of June 4, 2005 was $423.50 per ounce. Gold peaked at $850 per ounce in 1980 and bottom at $252 in 1999 when oil was below $10 a barrel. At $30,000 per ounce, governments then will have to made gold trading illegal, as FDR did in 1930 and we are back to square one. It is much easier for a government to outlaw the trading of gold within its borders than it is for it to outlaw the trading of its currency in world markets.  It does not take much to conclude that anyone who advices any strategy of long-term holding of gold will not get to the top of the class.

Heavily indebted poor countries need debt relief to get out of virtual financial slavery. Some African governments spend three times as much on debt service as they do on health care. Britain has proposed a half measure that would have the IMF sell about $12 billion worth of its gold reserves, which have a total current market value of about $43 billion to finance debt relief. The US has veto power over gold decisions in the IMF.  Thus Congress holds the key.  However, the mining industry lobby has blocked a vote. In January, a letter opposing the sale of IMF gold was signed by 12 US senators from Western mining states, arguing that the sale could drive down the price of gold. A similar letter was signed in March by 30 members of the House of Representatives. Lobbyists from the National Mining Association and gold mining companies, such as Newmont Mining and Barrick Gold Corp, persuaded the Congressional leadership that the gold proposal would not pass in Congress, even before it came up for debate. The BIS reports that gold derivatives took up 26% of the world’s commodity derivatives market yet gold only composes 1% of the world's annual commodity production value, with 26 times more derivatives structured against gold than against other commodities, including oil. The Bush administration, at first apparently unwilling to take on a congressional fight, began in April to oppose gold sales outright.  But President Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair announced on June 7 that the US and UK are “well on their way” to a deal which would provide 100% debt cancellation for  some poor nations to the World Bank and African Development Fund as a sign of progress in the G-8 debate over debt cancellation.

Jude Wanniski, a former editor of the Wall Street Journal, commenting in his Memo on the Margin on the Internet on June 15, 2005, on the headline of Pat Buchanan’s syndicated column of the same date: Reviving the Foreign-Aid Racket, wrote: “This not a bailout of Africa’s poor or Latin American peasants. This is a bailout of the IMF, the World Bank and the African Development Bank….  The second part of the racket is that in exchange for getting debt relief, the poor countries will have to spend the money they save on debt service on "infrastructure projects," to directly help their poor people with water and sewer line, etc., which will be constructed by contractors from the wealthiest nations…  What comes next? One of the worst economists in the world, Jeffrey Sachs, is in charge of the United Nations scheme to raise mega-billions from western taxpayers for the second leg of this scheme. He wants $25 billion A YEAR for the indefinite future, as I recall, and he has the fervent backing of The New York Times, which always weeps crocodile tears for the racketeers. It was Jeffrey Sachs, in case you forgot, who, with the backing of the NYTimes persuaded Moscow under Mikhail Gorbachev to engage in "shock therapy" to convert from communism to capitalism. It produced the worst inflation in the history of Russia, caused the collapse of the Soviet federation, and sank the Russian people into a poverty they had never experienced under communism.”

The dollar cannot go up or down more than 20% against any other major currencies within a short time without causing a major global financial crisis. Yet, against the US equity markets the dollar appreciated about 40% in purchasing power in the 2000-02 market crash, so had gold.  And against real estate prices between 2002 and 2005, the dollar has depreciated 60% or more. According to Greenspan’s figures, the Fed can print $8 trillion more fiat dollars without causing inflation. The problem is not the money printing. The problem is where that $8 trillion is injected. If it is injected into the banking system, then the Fed will have to print $3 trillion every subsequent year just to keep running in place. If the $8 trillion is injected into the real economy in the form of full employment and higher wages, the US will have a very good economy, and much less need for paranoia against Asia or the EU. But US wages cannot rise as long as global wage arbitrage is operative.  This is one of the arguments behind protectionism.  It led Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan to say on May 5 he feared what appeared to be a growing move toward trade protectionism, saying it could lessen the US and the world's economy ability to withstand shock.  Yet if democracy works in the US, protectionism will be unstoppable as long as free trade benefits the elite at the expense of the voting masses.

Fiat Money is Sovereign Credit

Money is like power: use it or lose it. Money unused (not circulated) is defunct wealth.  Fiat money not circulated is not wealth but merely pieces of printed paper sitting in a safe. Gold unused as money is merely a shiny metal good only as ornamental gifts for weddings and birthdays.  The usefulness of money to the economy is dependent on its circulation, like the circulation of blood to bring oxygen and nutrient to the living organism. The rate of money circulation is called velocity by monetary economists. A vibrant economy requires a high velocity of money.  Money, like most representational instruments, is subject to declaratory definition. In semantics, a declaratory statement is self validating. For example: “I am King” is a statement that makes the declarer king, albeit in a kingdom of one citizen. What gives weight to the declaration is the number of others accepting that declaration. When sufficient people within a jurisdiction accept the kingship declaration, the declarer becomes king of that jurisdiction instead of just his own house. When an issuer of money declares it to be credit it will be credit, or when he declares it to be debt it will be debt. But the social validity of the declaration depends on the acceptance of others.

Next: Trade in the Age of Overcapacity