Authored by Anne Stevenson-Yang, op-ed via BloombergQuint.com,
There’s no chance China will cut its trade surplus with the U.S. in response to President Donald Trump’s tariff threats. For starters, Washington has made no specific demand to which Beijing can respond. But its efforts may have an unexpected side effect: a debt crisis in China.
The 25 percent additional tariffs on exports of machinery and electronics looked, at first blush, like a stealth tax on offshoring. The focus on categories like semiconductors and nuclear components, in which U.S.-owned manufacturers in China are strong, recalled Trump’s 2016 promise to tax “any business that leaves our country.”
It seems, though, that offshoring wasn’t the target after all. Now, with the imposition of new tariffs on low-value exports that mostly involve Asian value chains, the simple fact of selling cheap products that the U.S. buys has become the problem.
Either way, the administration appears set on shrinking its current-account deficit (which, at a moderate 2.4 percent of GDP, is far lower than the 6 percent clocked in 2006-7) just as the Federal Reserve raises interest rates. Distress has already been registered in China. On July 19, the yuan (also known as the renminbi) hit 6.80 to the dollar, the weakest in a year and 7 percent lower than at the end of May.
Such a move is nothing earth-shaking for less controlled currencies. But a stable renminbi is a key plank in the leadership’s promise to its people, and the exchange rate is tightly managed by the central bank.
Chinese investors have been buying official assurances for a year that the renminbi would be a fortress, but now they’re not so sure and are exporting money again: May saw net capital outflows and a decline in the foreign-exchange reserves. The currency is the most visible sign of slippage in the image that China tries to project of an economy so brilliantly managed that the bright sun of GDP expansion is untroubled by even temporary clouds on trade, employment or consumption.
There are many other signs: The Shanghai Composite Index of stocks has declined 7 percent in a month, dropping below the government’s red line of 3,000 for the first time since September 2016. Corporate bonds are about to set a record for the most defaults in a year. Junk bond yields are spiking. The chorus of anxiety about debt is reaching a crescendo, with daily press reports on governments that can’t pay their employees or meet pension obligations. Property prices are tumbling in some cities and frozen in others whose governments have placed a finger in the dyke by halting transactions.
That the massive burden of debt will drag the economy into recession is as obvious as the empty towers that rise on every landscape. Precise estimates are difficult, since the government’s dedication to the optics of invincibility induces financial institutions to push debt into alternate, opaque channels....