China, forever China?

Not everybody is bullish about the longer term prospects for China. Peter Tasker, a market analyst for a Tokyo-based asset management firm wrote the following article that appeared on FT.com.

Emerging markets, it seems, have had a good crisis. In contrast to the debt-ridden G7 economies, they have quickly resumed their growth trajectory.

To anyone who has lived through the rise and fall of the Japanese bubble economy, it should set off alarm bells.

Remember that it was in the years following the 1987 "Black Monday" crash that Japanese assets went from being expensive to absurdly overvalued and the Nikkei's dizzy rise to 39,000 forced the bears to throw in the towel.

Then, as now, the logic seemed unassailable. While the western world was stuck in the post-crash doldrums, the Japanese economy had got back on track with apparent ease. Japanese corporations were using their high market capitalisations to finance acquisitions of foreign trophy assets. Japanese banks boasted the world's strongest credit ratings.

But what you saw was decidedly not what you got. The crisis, far from leaving Japan unscathed, exacerbated its structural problems and laid the groundwork for a far greater disaster. And it was the weak western economies, not Japan, that produced healthy investment returns over the next decade.

In reality, 1980s Japan was never going to be terminally damaged by weakness in export markets. Its current account surplus and strong fiscal position provided the macro policy leeway to make any slowdown strictly temporary. The Bank of Japan duly put the pedal to the metal and the recently deregulated banks went on a patriotic lending spree. High-end consumption boomed but the real action was in the asset markets and capital investment, which soared as a proportion of gross domestic product.

Sound familiar? It should, because the same dynamic is evident today in China and some other emerging economies.

Interest rates have been far too low for far too long. If the natural interest rate is, as the Swedish economist Knut Wicksell posited, around the level of nominal GDP growth, then China's interest rates should have been close to 10 per cent for most of this decade.

Alan Greenspan, former chief of the US Federal Reserve, has been criticised for holding interest rates too low and setting off a housing and credit bubble in the US. But if US monetary policy was wrong for the US, it was even more wrong for the high-growth countries that "imported" it. The result could only be a massive misallocation of capital.

For most of the 1980s, Japan, like China today, used government direction of bank credit ("window guidance") to overlay monetary policy. It was the combination of banking deregulation and the G7-sanctioned surge in the yen that ushered in the final manic stage of the Japanese bubble. By then there was no way out - asset market collapse and financial system wipe-out were baked in the cake.

If China continues to follow the Japanese template, the end of the dollar peg will be the trigger event, setting off a Godzilla-sized credit binge. Why would China's rulers embark on a such a disastrous course? Because the alternative - unleashing deflationary forces stored up over years of mercantilist policies - would be too painful to contemplate.