From Ms. Stevenson-Yang is co-founder of J Capital Research Ltd. Mr. Dougherty is chief investment officer of KDGF Asset Management at the WSJ:
From hiding capital outflows to propping up real-estate values, manipulating futures markets and squeezing short-sellers of the yuan, Chinese authorities have been trying to bring back the old, quasisuperstitious belief in Beijing’s omnipotence. But the political desperation behind these efforts betrays a different story: that an impending currency crisis is a signal of the dream’s undoing.
That’s why in China getting money out of the country is now the major preoccupation of both families and corporations. Risk-averse individuals are trading out of the wealth-management products they used to buy for 10% yields and moving their money to safety in the U.S., Australia, Canada and Europe. Chinese companies are making extravagant bids for overseas assets such as General Electric’s appliance division, the equipment maker Terex Corp., the near-dead Norwegian web browser Opera, the Swiss pesticides group Syngenta, technology distributor Ingram Micro and even the Chicago Stock Exchange.
One way to stem the crisis would be through depreciation. That would be sound policy for the people of China, but it’s a dreaded last resort for a leadership that wants, more than jobs for its people, to bolster buying power and save political face overseas. Yet history shows that holding the line on the currency is a losing strategy. Tightened liquidity causes more pain to the economy and simply delays the inevitable.
In other countries, currency crises usually followed a sudden and irreversible loss of confidence. The Asian Tigers were booming and then fell apart rapidly. Same in Russia. China faces the added difficulty of having little institutional memory and few tools to manage the economy in a time of capital scarcity. And there is no sign that capital-outflow pressure will ease.
And so a painful adjustment will be unavoidable: Property values will decline by an estimated 50% from the current reported average of $142 per square foot in tier-two cities, roughly equivalent to the national average in the U.S., where incomes are much higher. (Current price-to-income ratios in China are generally over 20, while the U.S. averages about three.) Excess industrial capacity will shut down. People will lose their jobs.
But Beijing still has a choice: Either let the yuan take some of the pressure of adjustment, or let all of it fall on the domestic market. Placed in such stark terms, a currency adjustment seems inevitable.
The macro logic here is impeccable and Ms Ms. Stevenson-Yang knows China better than most. I actually think that Chinese officials already understand this and the current back and forth on yuan policy is them searching for a way to do it in a manageable glide slope rather than crash.
