Global Investing

Is the outlook for China’s yuan uniting the biggest global markets bulls and bears? Well, kind of.

As China posts its biggest trade deficit (yes, that’s a deficit) of the new millennium and its monetary authorities flag greater “flexibility” of the yuan exchange rate (the PBOC engineered the US$/yuan’s second biggest daily drop on record on Monday), the chances of an internationally-controversial weakening of yuan in a U.S. election year have risen.  A weaker yuan would clearly up the ante in the global currency war, coming as it does amid Japan’s successful weakening of its yen this year and as Brazil on Monday felt emboldened enough in its battle to counter G7 devaluations by extending a tax curbing foreign inflows.  And, arguably, it could bring the whole conflagration around full circle, where currency weakening in the BRICs and other emerging economies blunts one of the desired effects of money-printing and super-lax monetary policy in the G7 — merely encouraging even more printing and so on.

Societe Generale’s long-time global markets bear Albert Edwards argued as much last week:  “We have long stated that if the Chinese economy looks to be hard landing, as we believe it will, the authorities there will actively consider renminbi devaluation, despite the political consequences of such action.”

But, unusually, BRIC-inventor and long-time global economy bull Jim O’Neill, in an FT op-ed this weekend, is not that far away from this yuan call either — even if he’s keener to stress the likelihood of a more volatile yuan rather than the risk of a weaker one per se and, unlike Edwards’ typically gloomy wider take, reckons it’s a benign development related to China’s healthy rebalancing of its economy away from export dependency to more domestic consumption

…currency reform does not equal currency appreciation. The renminbi is going to become more volatile like other currencies. It will go up as well as down against the dollar, partly because China’s current account surpluses are coming to an end, but also because it is opening up its capital account.

Reuters's top news and innovation teams have put together a web site on the yuan and the debate over its revaluation. Particularly worth a look after the weekend's statement by China that it would allow more flexibility in its currency exchange. You can access it here, but it looks like this:

The growing acrimony in the international debate over China's currency policy has led some to warn that Beijing could dig in its heels if pushed to hard to let its yuan rise.

But Barclays Capital says Beijing could let its currency strengthen as early as next month, notwithstanding its public resolve against Washington's threat to label it as a currency manipulator.

"They do have a 'If you stop pushing, we'll do it' attitude, which is kind of childish, really. But it will happen because they are the only country in the world, besides India, where there is a whiff of inflation," says Barclays' asset allocation head Tim Bond.

Is latte at Starbucks in China overpriced or is the local currency, the yuan, unexpectedly overvalued? The former is certainly more plausible, but it might be equally true that the yuan, if not overvalued, is at least not as undervalued as other measures suggest.

This conclusion would come from my proposed Grande Latte index, the caffeinated equivalent of The Economist's Big Mac index. The Grande Latte index, like its burger brother, is a light-hearted attempt to find a basket of goods that can be compared across countries to assess purchasing power parity (PPP) and, by extension, fair currency value. There are serious flaws, but I will save these for, ahem, the bottom of this blog.

The cross-country cost comparison of grande (i.e. medium in Starbucks-speak) lattes shows that the Seattle-based coffee chain's brew is rather dear in China. A grande latte costs $3.75 in the United States but $4.10 in China in dollar terms. It is even more expensive in Japan. The conclusion, that the yen is currently overvalued by 23 percent, accords well with the views of many analysts. But the idea that the yuan might be overvalued by 9 percent flies in the face of pretty much all conventional wisdom. It is also a drastically different perspective than that of the Big Mac index, which in its latest edition showed the yuan to be 49 percent undervalued.

The United States and China hold economic and strategic talks in Washington starting on July 27. The United States, International Monetary Fund and other groups have urged China to allow its currency to appreciate in order to help unwind global imbalances. Here is a chart showing the Chinese yuan vs the U.S. dollar.

UPDATE: More on U.S.-China economic ties here.