Now that we have a general
layout in our minds of how all of the mechanics are fitting
together, what I want to do in this video is discuss a little
bit about why the different actors would do what they are. How they could benefit or get
hurt from this cycle. And really, why it's so hard to
unwind each of the actors, why it's so hard for
them to unwind themselves from the scenario. Where I finished off this last
video, I talked about more cash being in American pockets
because of essentially, debt being cheaper, government can
spend more money, lower taxes. And I said that's more money to
buy Chinese products, but it's in general more money just
for Americans to spend on each other. They might buy each other's
houses or buy each other's services. So in a lot of ways, it does
stimulate the economy. For any Keynesians out there,
the more you spend, that will stimulate the economy,
lower taxes. For more conservatives,
that also can stimulate the economy. And in general, debt being
cheaper, lowers interest rates, all of these things
stimulate the economy. Now, normally when you're
stimulating the economy like this, and you have all of these
factors, you have the risk of higher inflation. But remember, inflation, or at
least price inflation, is just the price of all
of your goods. But notice, we're buying more
and more cheaper goods, and interest rates are low. So to some degree this whole
cycle also keeps-- I guess you could say, the surface growth
that the average American consumer experiences looks very
positive and inflation stays slow, so we can also
say money to buy each other's services. Now with that said, let's think
about why the different actors want to do this. So let's think about it from
the Chinese perspective. So if you are China and you're
starting off, you are a real Communist country maybe
30 years ago. And then you start to have
market-based reforms and you really want to enter the
developing world. But you don't have the
industrial base in the late '70s or early '80s to to
really compete with the Germanys, and the Americas, and
the Japans-- and when I say Americas, I mean United
States-- on their terms. So one advantage of export-led
growth is when you're just beginning to develop, you have
a less-developed society, you have less of an industrial
base. So when you have export-led led
growth, you can actually build, you actually will
encourage investment in factories that can go and
produce things for the developed world. And by keeping your currency
low-- by artificially keeping your currency low-- and
let me be clear. With just standard free trade,
labor costs are going to be cheaper in a place like China
or India that has a lower standard of living. So there would be just
straight-up free trade with no manipulation of currency. You would have things that
would move offshore, manufacturing and services
that move offshore. But if you super charge it, if
you make it even cheaper to manufacture, to do business in
China, it'll just accelerate the investment in production
in China. So this export-led growth--
let me put it this way. Artificially suppressed
currency-- and this also happened with Japan after World
War II-- artificial suppressed currency, and to some
degree we wanted that, because we want to Japan to
become intertwined with the United States. We wanted it to be successful. We saw what happened to Germany
after World War I, where it was so economically
unsuccessful that it was very easy for a character like
Hitler to come to power. So we learned our lesson. We said, you know, it's never
good for another country to not have an economic recovery. So we actually, to some degree,
many people think, encouraged it in Japan. But anyway, you artificially
suppress a currency, it makes your exports cheaper, and which
then encourages more investment in production
at home. And in this case, when I'm
talking about home, I'm talking about China or Japan. And more production at home
means more investment at home. More investment. If you're producing more in
China, you're going to have to build more factories. And this means literally more
jobs and, to a large degree, capital for the Chinese
people. More jobs and capital. And as you become more efficient
and as you go down that development curve, you'll
become more and more competitive over a whole
series of industries. And the idea is, once your
people get developed enough, you will have enough
capital at home. You will have enough of a
consumer base at home that some of this extra capacity
can then be turned back to your own people. That you can then use these
goods to sell to your own people to increase their
standard of living. So at first, you are building
washing machines and refrigerators for the United
States and Europe. And because you're building
those washing machines, those are jobs for Chinese and
eventually, once they have enough money, once there's
a critical mass of a middle-class Chinese, that same
capacity could be used to sell washing machines and
refrigerators to the Chinese, and it would raise their
standard of living. So it builds a manufacturing
base and a home market. Let me put it that way. So from China's point of view,
it looks unambiguously good. It builds manufacturing base,
and a domestic consumer market-- which just means people
in China, once they have jobs and they have capital,
will be able to buy the goods themselves-- and
domestic consumer market. Now where is the
negative here? You could imagine, if you are
the developed country that is buying these goods, they would
be cheap to begin with, but now they're even more
artificially cheap. Well you lose your manufacturing
base. So if you look at it from the
U.S. point of view, you lose the manufacturing base. And it's very clear that this
has been happening, whether you want to point to Japan or in
general, we've been losing our manufacturing base
to other countries. And some people view this
as a good thing. Some people say, hey,
we are further down the development curve. We shouldn't focus on
manufacturing, since manufacturing always tends to
go to whoever can do it for the cheapest price. We should focus on knowledge
things, whether it's pharmaceutical industry
or the IT industry. So there's maybe an
argument there. But the other reason why this
is maybe compelling to the United States is its
lower costs. So this looks like a negative,
and it is really a negative on some level, but the one I guess
you could call it a superficial positive is lower
cost for American consumers. So if you're not one of the
people who lost their jobs at the manufacturing plant, and
your the great majority of the rest of Americans, it seems
like a good thing. Things are cheaper for you, it's
cheaper to buy clothes for your kids. It's cheaper to buy a car. It's cheaper to buy
a refrigerator. It's cheaper to buy an
air conditioner. Now the problem is, when
and how does this end? Because this whole cycle that
we create, it might sound good for China. In theory it sounds good. You suppress you currency, your
goods are cheap, more production at home, more
investment at home, more capital and jobs eventually,
point that capital, point that investment back at your own home
market and now you are a developed country. Seems to make a lot
of sense, but it's easier said than done. In particular, it's not a
trivial thing to make that whole market be as consumptive
or as consumer-driven as maybe some of these developed
markets abroad. The other problem is
this whole time, remember what's happening. You're just accumulating this
mass of, in this case, U.S. dollars and you're using it
to go essentially lend to Americans, to lend to the
government, and it essentially gets lent to the American
people. And the minute that
you stop doing it, think about what happens. The minute that you stop, let's
not even talk about unwinding this, let's say the
minute that you stop buying dollars, your currency will
inflate and the holdings-- these trillions of dollars of
assets-- will drop in value, because the minute you stop
buying dollars, the currency markets will allow the yuan to
appreciate, the dollar to drop and so stopping buying leads
to drop in value. And that's just if
they stop buying. If they actually ever tried to
unwind this situation, as they start selling these, that
would drop the value of whether you want to call it
the dollar or the U.S. Treasuries even more, and so
everything else they're holding would drop in
even more value. So the whole time, in order to
keep their currency propped up, they've been buying these
assets, they've been buying these dollars. But the very act of unwinding it
will-- I won't say make it worthless-- but it will make the
value of their holdings go down dramatically. So you have a very hard
situation for the Chinesese. It's a hard situation
to even get out of. And it's just as hard for the
U.S. because if you think about it, a lot of people in
the U.S. would look at this and they'd say, hey,
this is horrible. This is why our manufacturing
base has gone away and it is partially true. And so they'd say hey, let
the currencies just do what they will. No more artificial distortions,
no more manipulation by government. Let the currencies be
freely trading. But what would happen then
to the United States? The minute that China stops
doing this, stops artificially supporting their currency, or
even worse, the minute they start unwinding all of these
dollars that they've accumulated, what's
going to happen? They're going to start selling
U.S. Treasuries, there's going to be lower demand for U.S.
Treasuries because they're not even buying it, they might
be selling it. Interest rates are going to go
up, long-term interest would go up in the United States. Now when long-term interest
rates go up, that means that borrowing is harder, that people
will want more interest to lend you money, that credit
card rates will go up and in general, the entire United
States economy will go down. Why are we in this recession
right now? Because it is harder
to borrow. We were so dependent on cheap
debt, and when that debt got a little less cheap, everything
kind of ground to a halt. That would be even worse if the
Chinese stopped buying our debt and allowed interest
rates to go up. So we are kind of locked in
this very perverse cycle, where although it looks like the
Chinese are unambiguously I guess, benefiting from this,
they are accumulating these assets and the minute that they
try to stop accumulating those assets, the value
of those assets are going to go down. And even though the United
States looks like it's getting their manufacturing base
depleted-- and that is true, it is getting its manufacturing
base depleted because of this-- it is keeping
interest rates low. And if you're a politician,
you like that. It makes the overall
environment look superficially positive. I'll leave you there and let
you think about this whole situation for a little bit. In the next video, I'll try to
do a little bit of analogy to think about where all
of this might go.