中国根本就没有外汇政策
2016-06-12 18:42阅读:
香港'南华早报'文章,
2014-3-11,
很多人(特别是美国政府)说,中国的汇率政策是重商主义,目的是严重地低估人民币,以刺激出口。
这完全不顾事实。2000年前的几十年内,人民币一直是高估的:严重高估。你还记得外汇兑换券吗?你还记得猖獗的外汇黑市吗?
我的结论是,中国根本就没有外汇政策。任何外汇政策都没有。如果一定要说有,那就是'脚踩西瓜皮的外汇政策':不管现在汇率是多少,尽量死扛,即使这个汇率严重高估或者严重低估。分析来分析去, 只是浪费时间。
South China Morning Post, 11 March 2014,
The yuan's exchange rate is far from being the result of a
carefully considered policy.
Analysts have built entire careers analysing and re-analysing China
and its economy. They make predictions, get proven wrong and
move
on to the next topic. It's been a very profitable pursuit given
that the so-called facts in much of the analysis are often
completely divorced from reality.
China's exchange rate policy is a case in point. In the past
decade, Beijing has been widely criticised for maintaining an
exchange rate policy that severely undervalues the yuan. It is also
universally agreed that that policy results from China’s
mercantilist culture.
It is said that the reversal of the yuan's exchange rate in the
past two weeks was an official attempt to punish speculators and
stop a one-way bet on the yuan. The mandarins in Beijing are
portrayed as having a carefully thought-out and meticulously
executed strategy on exchange rates.
They don't. And here's why. The yuan's exchange rate – whether it
is undervalued or overvalued – is the result of policy inaction,
which is the government's habit of just muddling through.
The mandarins in Beijing work with whatever they happen to have and
try very hard to maintain the status quo, whatever the consequences
of that status quo. Whatever the exchange rate happens to be, the
Chinese officials tend to try to keep it where it is, even when it
is very undervalued or very overvalued.
Suppose, when we wake up tomorrow, that the yuan is suddenly half
its present value against the US dollar. Will the supposedly
mercantilist Chinese government officials be happy?
No! They will see that rate as being too good and too favourable to
the Chinese! They do not want something like that. They will want
the old rate of six yuan to the dollar. But if the yuan slowly
moves towards five to the dollar, then five will become the
appropriate rate as far as the Chinese government is concerned.
This odd state of affairs is a consequence of a series of
historical accidents.
Those busy overanalysing the supposed shifts in Chinese exchange
rate policy do not understand this history. In the few decades
until the early 2000s, China maintained an overvalued yuan. When I
started to work for the People's Bank of China in 1983, the yuan
was officially fixed at two to the dollar, while the rate in the
vast black market was between seven and eight yuan to the dollar.
By the time I left the central bank six years later, the prevailing
black market rate had surged to 15 yuan to the dollar. The
government had been determined to keep the yuan’s official rate
extremely overvalued, against the advice of the International
Monetary Fund, the World Bank and others. As a regulatory officer,
I had participated in the central bank's work that began with
monitoring and then clamping down on the black market. A large
number of officials and black marketeers were punished and even put
behind bars for violation of foreign exchange controls.
But the black market got bigger each year. So big, in fact, that
the government had to introduce coupons to ration the limited
amount of foreign exchange reserves. This was not officially
abandoned for 16 years. Partly to minimise corruption, the Chinese
government devalued the yuan sharply, by as much as 30 per cent in
one stroke, to 8.5 yuan to the dollar in 1991. That move, coupled
with several other factors, significantly boosted China's exports
and reduced the scope for black marketeers over the next two
decades.
The problem is that the devaluation was overdone, and the growth of
the country's foreign exchange reserves has got out of hand.
Policymakers in the real world have political, social, and economic
imperatives to deal with. Sometimes, they make policy based on gut
instinct.
Today's analysts forget the consensus view on China's exchange rate
from the 1980s to the early 2000s. Back then the yuan was
considered overvalued and set for imminent demise.
I was a contrarian voice in the 1990s when, as an analyst at HSBC,
I declared that the yuan was undervalued and that China did not
need to sell a dollar-denominated bond that HSBC and Goldman Sachs
were underwriting. I began working for UBS soon after.
So what is the lesson to be drawn from analysing China’s foreign
exchange movements over the last 35 years? First, it is wrong to
conclude that China has a natural bias towards an undervalued yuan.
Second, it is pointless to read too much into the supposed Chinese
exchange rate policy.
When I was at the central bank, I never felt that there was a
policy on the exchange rate, except to keep the status quo.
Analysts may say that some policies are “unsustainable”, but they
can be stretched for many more years – even for decades. Just
because an exchange rate severely deviates from the “fair rate”
does not mean it will correct in the near term – not least because
the definition of fair value is a fudge anyway.
Joe Zhang is the author of Inside China’s Shadow
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