- Wei Gu is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are her own. -

The U.S.-China tire dispute threatens to spill into other sectors and squeeze Chinese exporters’ already razor-thin margins further. It might seem mind-boggling to many that Chinese manufacturers are still hanging on to weak overseas markets even though the domestic economy looks much healthier and surely offers more potential.

But there are structural reasons why the grass is greener outside China. The risk of not getting paid, or getting paid late, is significantly lower when dealing with foreign buyers. The cost of international shipping has dropped so much that it can be cheaper to send goods over the Pacific Ocean than across the country.

In addition, selling to large buyers such as Wal-Mart creates volumes large enough to compensate for weak margins. Moreover, Chinese exporters get all sorts of export rebates and local government incentives which help to lower their costs.

But as the tire spat has illustrated, Washington can slap punitive duties on Chinese imports simply by pointing to a significant increase in imports from China. By imposing penalties in this case, President Obama has opened the door for a slew of similar complaints against Chinese goods. It will only be a matter of time before other countries, worried about where those displaced Chinese exports might end up, start to follow suit.

That’s why Chinese policy makers need to get more serious about stimulating domestic spending. It is time for Beijing to revamp a system built over the past three decades that explicitly and implicitly favours exports and to encourage manufacturers to prioritise selling to the domestic market.

A good first step would be to reduce some of the export incentives China offers to certain industries. These effectively subsidise foreign consumers at the expense of domestic customers. For example, Chinese tyre-makers get a tax rebate of about 9 percent on the value of the products they sell abroad. That’s why tyre makers can afford to price exported tyres more cheaply than ones sold at home, according to Xu Qiyuan, a researcher at China’s Social Science Academy.

To date, however, China’s response to the credit crunch has been to boost incentives to prop up export markets. Beijing raised export rebates on 3,802 items from April 1. Textile exporters also got an increase in their rebate to 16 percent from 15 percent. This activity is not illegitimate and many countries subsidise exports. But the U.S. enforcement action shows that this policy may have practical limits.

China needs more than just a change of heart on subsidies. Longer term, Beijing needs to foster the development of a healthy credit culture for suppliers so they can get paid on time, and to improve China’s transportation infrastructure in order to reduce the cost of moving goods around the country, and most importantly, to break down local protectionism that discriminates against suppliers from other provinces. It may seem odd but China needs to create a single internal market.

Despite all the talk about Chinese consumers being unwilling to spend due to a lack of a social safety net, one important reason that they don’t buy much at home is because prices are often too high . When “frugal” Chinese consumers go to Hong Kong or London, they immediately become big spenders, splashing out thousands of dollars on clothing, cosmetics, bags and watches. The irony is that a lot of the things they buy are actually made in China, but are simply not available there, or cost much more.

Moreover, the lack of a single market hampers foreign companies seeking to sell to China. Although foreign executives might fancy China as a giant market with 1.3 billion customers, the reality is that it is extremely fragmented, so economies of scale are hard to achieve. Transporting goods from one province to another can incur hefty tolls levied by local governments keen to raise local revenue and make it harder for companies to break into their local markets.

The credit problem also needs to be addressed. Big Chinese retailers only pay for goods on delivery. An exporter, by contrast, gets a letter of credit when the order is placed, and this can be cashed in to finance production.

China’s rebalancing away from export dependence has barely begun, and it will take a long time to change attitudes. But now would be a good time to make a start. The recent trade disputes over Chinese tyres and toys should serve as warning shots. China’s leaders must start to make the domestic market more friendly to suppliers and consumers.

– At the time of publication Wei Gu did not own any direct investments in securities mentioned in this article. She may be an owner indirectly as an investor in a fund —

–James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own–

If and when China makes its currency convertible and opens its financial system the stage will be set for a bubble that should make the dotcom and housing booms look tame.

China has recently signaled its key aspirations: for a greater international role for the renminbi and for Shanghai to become a great financial capital. Neither is imminent, but both imply, if not require, a series of steps that, taken in combination with China’s legitimately great potential for growth, could lead to a bubble of magnificent and dangerous proportions.

Magnificent in that, like the dotcom bubble or the railroad boom in the U.S. in the 19th century, a bubble in domestic China is directionally right and will build useful things which will change the world. A bubble, after all, needs a good story and China has one of the best ever.

Dangerous because, like the housing bubble, it will inevitably go too far and could take down banks and banking systems globally.

Perhaps rather than dotcom or housing, the most useful template for China is closer to home; namely the Japanese bubble which preceded its ongoing malaise, according to Dylan Grice, a strategist at Societe Generale in London.

“In the medium term we face the mother of all asset bubbles in China. The fundamental story is a good one; there are just lots and lots of people to sell to,” Grice said.

“If you drop a ton of liquidity on people it is possible that they will do rational things with it, but more likely they will do something pretty stupid.”

The parallels are strong. Both China and Japan successfully industrialized and opted for high-savings, low-consumption economies which concentrated on exports, exporting capital and keeping their currencies artificially weak. The result in both cases was a huge stockpile of U.S. Treasuries.

Both, too, scared their western clients and competitors witless. Remember U.S. autoworkers ritually burning Japanese cars? This of course was mingled with admiration and a sense that the global balance of power was changing, giving bubble thinking a strong push.

Japan slowly and over a long period liberalized its capital account; allowing the yen to float freely and deregulating financial markets.

Grice points out that during some of the 1980s the world fell in love with the yen, figuring that Japan’s new ascendancy meant that it would rise and rise. As a result Japan Inc. could in effect borrow in dollars, swap it into yen and get paid for the privilege. Much of the money found its way into the stock market, sending stocks to stratospheric levels and reinforcing the bubble illusion.

The Nikkei index of stocks went to the moon and Tokyo residents ended up needing 100-year mortgages to afford tiny apartments.

GOOD AND BAD BUBBLES

Of course, that is not where it ended with Japan, which had its bust and which is still struggling with deflation, though that is in part a function of a shrinking workforce.

Japan liberalized its financial system and currency arrangements under strong pressure from the United States.

China almost certainly has more relative real power today and there is every sign that it will open up on its own terms and to its own schedule.

But open it probably will.

Chinese officials have expressed a desire for the renminbi to play a great role in world trade, naming 2020 as a date by which it can play the role of a reserve currency.

That is almost certainly going to require deregulation of financial markets, something also needed if Shanghai is to become a global financial capital.

China now buys Treasuries not because it thinks they are good value, but because those purchases maintain a competitive currency, not to mention protecting existing holdings. As that ends, much of the money will seek out high returns, and as the renminbi strengthens international capital will doubtless pile on and pile in.

That kind of liquidity and deregulation, in combination with strong national pride and a legitimately fantastic story, is a step-by-step recipe for a bubble. So it proved in Japan, so it likely will be in China.

A look at recent experience in China only underlines this. Speculation is rife and billions in government mandated loans have leaked into stock market bets.

China’s government undoubtedly understands all of this and is surely determined to maintain control. They may not find it that easy. Getting rich, as we’ve seen in the United States, is a heady business and it is easy to start to believe your own press.

As the momentum builds and the money rolls in it will be easy to see it as a great country meeting its prosperous destiny.

Given the size of the opportunity and the strength of the story, China’s bubble will be huge. Investors would do well to avoid being in the immediate vicinity when it bursts.

–At the time of publication James Saft did not own any direct investments in securities mentioned in this article. He may be an owner indirectly as an investor in a fund.–

— Rafael Ramírez is the James Martin Senior Research Fellow in Futures at Oxford University and author of “Business Planning for Turbulent Times: New Methods for Applying Scenarios” edited with John W. Selsky and Kees van der Heijden. Ramírez attended a session at the World Economic Forum’s gathering in Dalian, China, on managing global risks.

Reuters asked Ramírez to elaborate on five overlooked risks the world is confronting as it works its way through the current recession. His response is below. The views expressed are his own.

Risk one: Confusing risk with uncertainty

The first — and perhaps most important risk — is confusing categories of ignorance. This most centrally is about confusing risk with uncertainty. It entails pretending that probability (with data sets of past events with distributions of occurrence which are relevant for the future) is relevant for both “known unknowns” one cannot model with probability as well as unknown unknowns in one’s plausible futures where no data set is available, such as those of unique events.

Unfortunately, while the uncertainty that we became aware of as the financial crisis unfolded did not obey to the characteristics of “risk”, a lot of the policy interventions and “solutions” that were put in place pretended that the risks were known — and thus are well positioned to create new trouble. What we need to do instead is accepting that uncertain ignorance - for which forecasting, probability and risk are irrelevant - is now a common characteristic of our environment, and that we need technologies based on plausibility, like scenario planning. Plausibility is not going to be easy to implant in large organizations with established teams whose livelihood depends upon calculation of probability - but is necessary.

Risk two: Failure to link different types of knowledge

A second under-explored risk is keeping different forms of knowledge disconnected. This is typically manifested as keeping knowledge in the organizations that develop and use knowledge (like universities, corporations, or patent offices) in silos, while also ignoring that different scales create difficulty to translate applicability from small to large contexts and vice-versa. Failure to link different types of knowledge together, and to organize the architectures that enable this, prevents effective action. So the risk is that insufficient conversations linking different forms of knowledge will be made available, and that “solutions” in one context create (bigger) problems in others that have not been consulted.

Risk Three: Finding false comfort in “solutions”

A third important risk is the ongoing and often unquestioned over-dependence on the comfort of “solution”. The promised comfort in any one solution leads people addressing complex messes to construe these as a single problem that, once solved, will be OK.  The emotional appeal of “solution-security” is highly misleading, and way too often the “solution provider” over-promises and under-delivers. For example, the “solution” confidence to develop and do well after “winning a war” has led to terrible approaches to deal with messes such as poverty, drugs, and terrorism. The “wars” that have been declared on poverty, drugs, and terrorism have not only not delivered the promised solutions but have also mis-fired and created even messier messes.

Risk Four: Pushing irreversible solutions

A fourth under-attended to risk is promoting irreversible designs. Uncertain complexity in our contexts means that what we do may be the wrong thing to do if the context changes. So designing irreversible options is the only responsible thing to do. Certain forms of bioengineering such as some GMO crops and toxic cocktails of insecticides and herbicides have created conditions in the countryside (such as the collapse of honeybee colonies) that may well be irreversible, and which would be terrible if scenarios for which they were not designed unfold.

Risk Five: Giving too much priority to the short-term

Finally, the form of discounting that is used to value things is highly risky. The short-term is  given far higher priority in relation to long-term effects than sustainable solutions call for. Contextualising the short-term in long-term implications is one of the key challenges to design better governance than we have today.

–James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.–

Financial markets have plenty to be worried about but their latest concern — a trade war between the United States and China — should not be on the list.

Aligned self interest and a knowledge on both sides of the causes of the Great Depression should limit matters to a kind of trade war Kabuki, a highly stylized piece of theatre in which the United States shakes its fist and China responds in kind but no blows land.

The Obama administration on Friday slapped tariffs of 35 percent on the import of auto tires from China, reacting to a surge in imports and complaints from the United Steelworkers union. It also acted on the recommendation of the independent U.S. International Trade Commission.

China duly responded, announcing investigations into subsidies made to U.S. chicken producers and auto products, as well as vowing to take its case to the World Trade Organization.

Shares around the world sold off on Monday at least partly in response to the dispute, which awakened memories of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariffs and the trade war that ensued, a key cause of the Great Depression.

What’s worse, the United States is not just spitting into the wind of history but also into the face of its largest creditor. China holds about $1.8 trillion of Treasuries and any decision on their part to lighten up would send the dollar into a steep decline and torpedo U.S. plans to fund its fiscal deficit.

That’s just it. The United States and China need one another, and both sides are big enough and mature enough to understand this. China cannot dump U.S. investments without walloping its own portfolio, nor can either side accomplish any of their economic goals without the other as a client.

It is best to understand the U.S. move not as the first salvo in a war, but as a relatively small sop thrown to a domestic constituency, organized labor, that President Obama needs for other purposes, notably health care. It is also, in an odd way, a sign not of weakness but of the stabilization of the global economy. It is only now that things have calmed down that the United States would dare to appease a domestic special interest in this way. Had they done this in February, financial markets would have fallen over in a dead swoon.

The dollar, tellingly, actually rose as a first reaction to the fuss, hardly the reaction you would expect if the Chinese were preparing to dump dollars. Treasuries lost ground, but nothing extraordinary.

STUPID BUT PROBABLY HARMLESS

Technically, the United States is probably within its rights to impose the duties. WTO rules allow this if a surge in imports threatens a domestic industry, even if the trade is not unfair.

Rights and laws aside, the duties are indefensible. They protect less efficient makers and simply punish China, not for unfair trade practices, but for success. They also punish U.S. consumers, arguably hurting living standards more than the loss of the jobs the tariffs are presumably meant to protect.

Expect China to make a lot of noise about this. They also have domestic audiences, and theirs are rightly aggrieved. Expect too the rest of the G20 leaders who will assemble this week in Pittsburgh to say all the right things in public and to play peacemakers in private.

What I would not expect is for this to accelerate into something damaging and destabilizing. The stakes are too high and the political rewards domestically for a trade war are tiny in comparison.

There are, however, longer-term issues which are unsettling. China’s interests and those of the United States are diverging and over time there will be serious conflicts to be negotiated. The system of China trading goods for Treasuries which did so much to raise living standards in China and fill garages with stuff in the United States is no longer tenable.

The U.S. will consume less of China’s stuff and must even compete with China more effectively for exports, probably in areas like military technology where sales will be doubly unsettling for the Chinese.

China, over time, will not want to subsidize U.S. borrowing rates and will want to diversify its currency holdings. This will not be easy or pleasant for the United States but, broadly speaking, is probably in its own long-term interests.

All of this could blow up, especially if it undermines confidence in Treasuries and the dollar. It has not yet, and I think the two protagonists will put off the serious business of working out their conflicting interests until either the global economy returns to robust growth or things in the United States stay bad long enough to change the political math of a real trade war.

We are not there yet, and for at least another year probably won’t be.

–At the time of publication James Saft did not own any direct investments in securities mentioned in this article. He may be an owner indirectly as an investor in a fund.–

– Aron Cramer is president and CEO of BSR, a global business network and consultancy focused on sustainability. The views expressed are his own. —

As the World Economic Forum’s “Summer Davos” meeting in Dalian, China, gets underway, it is a bit chilling to think back to how the financial crisis was unfolding in real time during last year’s event.

As the 1,000 leaders gathering for this year’s event spend three days debating how to restore economic growth and social stability, the need to focus on a long-term transition to a more sustainable economy is clearer than ever.

Doing this will require unprecedented cooperation among businesses and consumers. The companies that build new business models and innovative products and services will win in the reset world, and shape an economy that avoids disruptions like the one that erupted last fall.

At this year’s meeting, I am chairing two workshops, where we will explore how to build new models of production and consumption that hold the potential to create not only a return to growth, but to a more sustainable model of growth.

Arising from an interlocking set of crises, three immense challenges stand before us. We must:

1. Return to economic growth while deleveraging massive debt.
2. Transition to a low-carbon economy that uses natural resources more efficiently.
3. Create new social contracts both inside and between nations.

These simultaneous challenges present a turning point for the world comparable in scale to the one we faced in the aftermath of World War II.

The good news is that the “reset world” currently under construction contains a multitude of opportunities just waiting to be captured by innovative companies ready to collaborate.

We are already starting to see a new wave of collaboration that will be the foundation of renewed economic growth. GE and Google are teaming up to build smart energy systems that radically reduce the reliance of consumers and business on carbon-based fuel. Nike is pioneering a collaborative R&D model called “Green Xchange,” which will create an open-source model for product development focused specifically on environmentally friendly products.

It’s heartening to see that this collaboration now includes the entire business “value chain”—which extends from a product’s development to its distribution and use—where companies are exploring ways products can be developed more efficiently, from design to assembly to distribution.

One of the meetings I’ll be running this week is a workshop with 50 CEOs and experts who are designing new production models that will deliver economic growth for the post-crisis era. The redesign of value chains, while somewhat invisible to the general public, is crucial to our economic future. Virtually all products, from a simple T-shirt to Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner, rely on a dense web of companies focusing on a single step in the production process.

Tomorrow’s solutions won’t be built behind the towering ramparts of single companies. Instead, they rely on collaboration across the spectrum, ranging from design firms like IDEO to well-known brands like Pepsi, and from logistics providers like Jordan’s Aramex International to retail giants like Wal-Mart.

The ultimate challenge all companies face is creating products that meet a global class of consumers without requiring several planets’ worth of water, fuel, and other natural resources. This means products must satisfy the needs of 600 million Indian villagers as well as they do for the 500 million citizens of the European Union. This means greater coordination of transportation, just as sea carriers like Maersk have done by partnering with their clients to use slow (and therefore more fuel-efficient) shipping to get products from Asian factories to American ports. This means innovative packaging to reduce, if not eliminate, waste. And this means developing new ways to communicate with consumers so that they can better understand the social and environmental implications of their consumption habits—and find ways to save money in the bargain.

At this year’s Summer Davos—a year after the onset of the Great Recession—we know not only what the challenge is, but also what the answers look like.

This week’s event is dedicated to companies the World Economic Forum has designated as “New Champions.” There is little doubt that many of these companies will come from Brazil, China, India, the Middle East, and elsewhere in the developing world. But new champions will be determined more by mindset than by geography. Companies that keep their eyes on long-term trends, that meet people’s needs within environmental limits, and that look at innovative collaboration will shape the future. Companies that don’t will find that the financial crisis was only the beginning of their problems.

– Eric Auchard is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

The fate of Yahoo Inc has become intertwined in the public’s imagination with the success or failure of its dealings with Microsoft Corp in recent years.

That’s despite the fact that as much as 70 percent of the value investors put on Yahoo’s depressed shares are tied up in its international assets or cash holdings — factors that have nothing to do with Microsoft.

Yahoo’s operations trade for just $5 to $6 per share out of its current $15 share price, once you exclude its Asian investments and the value of its cash. Its hidden assets in Japan and Chinese affiliates — Yahoo Japan Corp and China’s Alibaba Group — alone are worth around $6 to $7 per share.

The trouble is that Yahoo needs to find a way to cash out of its increasingly rocky relationship with Alibaba Group, in which it holds a 39 percent stake after it pulled back from operating its own business in China in 2005.

Yahoo’s best chance here may come next year if Alibaba succeeds with a second IPO of its Taobao.com consumer ecommerce site, building on the success of the 2007 IPO of Alibaba.com, now valued at more than US$13 billion on the Hong Kong exchange.

Truth be told, Yahoo’s huge success in building the biggest U.S. Internet media destination never translated very well overseas, despite the early foray into Asia that left it with lucrative assets in Japan and China. These passive investments came to substitute for a global operating strategy.

But that’s changing now, as Yahoo once again has begun investing in international operations it can fully control.

In its latest such push, Yahoo said on Tuesday that it would buy Maktoob.com, the largest Internet media site for the Arab world, with an estimated 16.5 million users. Terms were not disclosed.

Yahoo’s international stronghold is Asia, where it had 172 million unique users in the month of June, according to industry estimates. It is the top player in Japan through its stake in Softbank-controlled Yahoo Japan, and is dominant in Taiwan and Hong Kong as well.

In India, Yahoo has the most visited home page and is the most popular provider of e-mail, instant messaging and online news to consumers. In a country mad on the sport, Yahoo operates the most popular site for cricket fans. Yahoo had 23 million unique monthly users in India in June, according to market researcher comScore.

But Yahoo stock gets little to no stock market credit for these international operations. Converting market share into meaningful financial results will take years. First, Yahoo must develop its patchwork of leading properties in places like the Philippines and Vietnam and Latin America into a global franchise. And it’s hard to see how Yahoo can regain lost ground in Europe’s more developed Internet markets.

Until now, the trap for Yahoo has been that much of its international value remains latent, locked up in investments in Japan and China rather than in operating businesses it controls. That is changing, slowly.

This leaves Yahoo at the mercy of an eventual rebound in U.S. advertising markets. For the foreseeable future, any significant rebound in Yahoo’s share price depends on conjecture over the still unknown potential of getting into bed with Microsoft.

– At the time of publication Eric Auchard did not own any direct investments in securities mentioned in this article, with the exception of a token Yahoo share. He may be an owner indirectly as an investor in a fund. –

– Wei Gu is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are her own —

Chinese banks are like enthusiastic runners on an accelerating treadmill. The weakening economy means poor lending decisions are threatening to catch up with them, but the banks are sprinting ahead by expanding their loan books ever faster. They cannot keep this up for ever.

For now things still look fine. China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) this week claimed that Chinese banks were managing credit risk sagely, pointing to record low non-performing loan ratios. Given the massive increase in the number of loans outstanding — up 24 percent since the start of the year — it’s not surprising that the proportion of them that are non-performing at large commercial banks, which accounts for 60 percent of the lending, has declined from 2.4 percent to 1.8 percent in the past six months.

Chinese banks appear to be focusing their lending on regions which have suffered the most in the crisis. The five regions that have shown the largest increase in new loans are the ones that were hit hardest by the downturn, namely coastal cities such as Guangdong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shandong, plus Beijing. These are also the regions that have experienced among the slowest growth this year. This suggests that loan growth is being driven by official policy rather than the product of bankers seeking the most attractive investment opportunities.

Chinese banks had double-digit NPL ratios before Beijing cleaned them up in preparation for their listing on foreign exchanges. Foreign banks with risk management expertise were brought in, and offered cheap stakes in Chinese institutions to encourage them to share their knowledge. This led to an improvement in lending standards as Chinese banks installed expensive computer databases and formed central credit offices.

It is not clear however how deeply these reforms have been entrenched. The banks remain very decentralized and lending standards are generally lower than their foreign counterparts.

In the past few years, Chinese bankers were restrained by the regulator from going on lending sprees. Banks were given lending quotas to prevent the economy from overheating. This year, with growth the main concern, there were no ceilings.

Chinese banks have clearly now opened the flood gates and are taking on more credit risk. The chief banking regulator Liu Mingkang said at a closed-door meeting in Tianjiin this April that the maximum Chinese banks should lend out a year is 6 trillion yuan ($878 billion), anything above that would be deemed as risky. During the first half alone, they lent out a whopping 7.37 trillion yuan ($1.08 trillion).

The current NPL statistics are irrelevant. The test for Chinese banks will come in the next 2 to 5 years, as the latest wave of lending shows its worth. True, many infrastructure loans seem to have implicit government backing, but less come with strong underlying cashflows. Instead of celebrating the record-low NPLs, the regulator should take it as a worrying sign that Chinese banks are now running hard to stand still.

— At the time of publication Wei Gu did not own any direct investments in securities mentioned in this article. She may be an owner indirectly as an investor in a fund —

– Wei Gu is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are her own –

China’s bubbly stock market is making heroes out of some unlikely companies. And none more so than BYD Co. , in which Warren Buffett plans to take a 10 percent stake.

BYD has a much-hyped project to manufacture electric vehicles. Its shares have surged 140 percent in the past three months and 440 percent in the past year. They now trade at 74 times of current year profit and 54 time of next year earnings. That is double the level of capital goods companies and four times the multiple on which Chinese automakers trade.

BYD seems to have become the “poster child” for environmentally friendly transport. For all that, it has not yet sold any electric cars in its home market, though it has hundreds of trial customers in the government. The project may have real substance and it’s fair to say that Buffett has probably done his homework. But meaningful earnings are at least two to three years away, assuming those trials are successful.

Meanwhile, BYD’s real business is producing conventional cars and cell phone components. These do not support the company’s stratospheric multiple. Investors seem to have bid up the shares, taking their lead from Buffett. But they should remember that Buffett bought in at around HK$7 a share, and now the stock is trading at HK$42. Moreover, Buffett’s investment is under consideration in Beijing, and the company does not expect a decision until October.

But that doesn’t seem likely to puncture the bullish mood. BYD’s stock surged as much as 9 percent this week after it bought a bus maker in a pretty uninspiring deal. This is a sector where there is overcapacity. BYD’s deal got pulses racing because — surprise, surprise — the company talked about using its electric propulsion technology to power buses.

Of course, Buffett may be on to something and BYD’s chairman Wang Chuanfu may be right when he says he sees BYD as the largest auto maker in China in 2015 and the leading player in the world in 2025, with annual output surpassing 10 million vehicles. But this remains a mid-sized, highly geared company.

When stock markets bubble up, investors lose the ability to discriminate between hype and reality. And so it seems with China. Investors in BYD might ponder how much more bullish they are than the Sage of Omaha in the prospects for what remains a car and battery maker, and fasten their seat belts.

Dr. Gerard Lyons is chief economist and group head of global research, Standard Chartered Bank. The views expressed are his own.

The world is witnessing a shift in the balance of power, from the West to the East. This shift will take place over decades, and the winners will be:
- Those economies that have financial clout, such as China
- Those economies that have natural resources, whether it be energy, commodities or water, and will include countries, some in the Middle East, some across Africa, Brazil, Australia, Canada and others in temperate climates across, for instance, northern Europe
- And the third set of winners will be countries that have the ability to adapt and change. Even though we are cautious about growth prospects in the U.S. and UK in the coming years, both of these have the ability to adapt and change.

China is at the center of this shift.

The scale and pace of change in China is breathtaking. Against this backdrop of dramatic change, let me look at China’s impact on the global economy, especially in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

It is now clear that the financial crisis was a result of three key factors: an imbalanced global economy; a systematic failure of the financial system in the West; and a failure to heed the many warning signs.

The world needs to move towards a more balanced economy. But that will take years. The imbalanced nature of the world economy led some to point the finger of blame at the savers, such as China. The 1944 Bretton Woods agreement placed no obligation on savers, countries with current account surpluses. The obligation to change was put on those countries with the deficits. This has to change.

Whilst China and other savers may not be the main source of the recent problem, they are part of the solution.

To move to a balanced global economy, the West, or at least countries like the U.S., the UK and Spain, need to spend less, save more. In contrast, regions like the Middle East and Asia need to save less and spend more. It sounds easy. It is not. It requires a fundamental shift in China and in Asia’s growth model.

At the recent Asian Development Bank (ADB) meeting in Bali, the President called for Asia to rebalance its economy by: expanding the social safety net; providing assistance to small and medium-sized enterprises; and deepening bond markets.

Amongst those present, I detected more enthusiasm for the social safety net than for further financial sector innovation. One of the lessons of the 1997-98 Asian economic crises was the need to open up the financial sector at a speed best suited to domestic needs. One speed does not fit at all. Yet, it is important that if Asia is to see a shift in its growth model it needs to see a reduction in savings and this will be achieved sooner by deepening and broadening its capital markets.

This involves many changes, such as increased personal finance and allowing people to borrow against future income. It requires deep and liquid corporate bond markets, shifting the region’s culture away from equities, and giving firms alternative sources to bank lending and, in China particularly, reducing corporate savings, possibly through higher dividends.

China will play an important role in this process. It has already helped regional integration, building on the Chiang Mai Initiative, and it has engaged in a number of bilateral swap arrangements with countries around the world.

Another important global impact is the importance of China in helping world trade, investment and financial flows. Over the last decade the three words seen most regularly were “Made in China”. Over the next decade the three most common words might be “Owned by China”. China’s stock of overseas direct investment is one-thirtieth of that of the USA. The stock of foreign direct investment in China far exceeds the total amount China has invested overseas. Last year, China’s investment overseas was $50 billion. Now this is changing. Chinese firms are taking advantage of a strong renminbi and of strategic backing from Beijing to expand overseas purchases.

The impact of China on global commodities is already evident. China’s rapid growth and its strategic needs saw it accumulating increasing amounts of commodities. For instance, it accounts for about one-third of global demand for aluminum and copper, and as much as 38 per cent for zinc. In the first half of this year there has been stockpiling by China of a range of commodities. This stockpiling could be explained by many factors, including the strength of the Chinese yuan and the weakness of commodity prices. In future years one would expect this to continue. And it will not just be metals. Demand for food and soft commodities will be important. As incomes rise, food tastes will change.

Furthermore, 28 per cent of Europe’s land is arable, while this figure is 19 per cent for the U.S., but for China it is only 10 per cent. As a result, China will not only buy commodities, but it will also invest in countries producing commodities. This will reinforce the new corridors of increasing trade and investment flows between China and Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.

China’s purchase of commodities has a direct link into the inflation outlook globally. In previous years, CPI figures around the world could have been renamed China Price Indices, as China exported deflation. In the next few years, if there is an inflation issue it is likely to be through higher commodity prices, with China’s demand exerting a key influence.

China will have a big bearing on the dollar. There is a slow burning fuse under the dollar. Even if the U.S.’s economic power were to wane, it is important to stress that the U.S. is still the world’s major economy. There are no credible alternatives to the dollar. Long after the UK ceased to be the world’s major economy a century ago, sterling remained the world’s reserve currency for some time. During this crisis it was noteworthy that, despite much negative sentiment towards the dollar, in the time of trouble the depth and liquidity of U.S. financial markets helped support the dollar as a safe haven.

Furthermore, it would not be a surprise if - as a result of this crisis – more countries learned the lesson of Asian economies after their crisis, and decided to accumulate foreign exchange reserves. During this crisis those countries with high FX reserves were afforded an additional degree of protection. Of course, not all reserves need be in dollars. Even now, countries with large reserve holdings do not actively want to sell the dollar. It is not in their interests to do so. Instead of this active diversification – or outright selling of U.S. assets - there is what I call “passive diversification”, whereby a smaller but still sizeable proportion of their net new reserves are allocated to dollars.

For its reserve currency status the dollar needs to retain its status as the medium of exchange and as a store of value. Interestingly, China and Brazil recently agreed to pay each other in their own currencies, not in dollars as is the norm, whilst the pressure China has put on America regarding the dollar’s value highlights the concern some have over its future value.

China still has a huge balance of payments: its surplus reached 9.6 per cent of GDP last year. The authorities have kept the yuan stable versus the dollar, although this has meant it has appreciated on a trade weighted basis. The Chinese are also, it seems, encouraging trade settlement in Chinese yuan. Yet the reality is the Chinese yuan needs to become fully convertible for it to challenge the dollar and that is not going to happen any time soon. In the future I would expect to see more countries manage their exchange rate against the currencies of the countries with which they trade. This, plus the new trade corridors I mentioned earlier, and the likelihood of increased investment flows into emerging economies with higher growth rates, may all suggest downward pressure on the dollar. But this is likely to be a slow process.

On the global stage, China’s rise is also leading to the rise of State Capitalism. A couple of years ago we looked at this in the context of Sovereign Wealth Funds. Add in large foreign exchange reserves, government pension funds and state owned enterprises, and the role of the state has become far more important.

Finally, China’s influence on global policy forum is important. Already this crisis has seen a shift, with the G20 (Group of Twenty) taking a prominent role. The Chinese took a pro-active role ahead of the London Summit, which was welcome, and is perhaps a sign of things to come. One wonders, however, whether it is the G2 of the US and China that might emerge as the real power. Earlier this year President Obama signaled a shift from the Strategic Economic Dialogue, to the Strategic and Economic Dialogue. This extra word “and” signals perhaps a significant change.

- John Kemp is a Reuters columnist. The views expressed are his own. -

Reports that China has asked for a discussion about reserve currencies at next week's expanded Group of Eight summit in Italy has added to confusion about whether the country wants to dethrone the dollar from its status as the world's sole reserve currency. But the very fact the issue has been pushed onto the agenda suggests that a fundamental shift is underway.

Given the U.S. government's enormous borrowing requirements over the next decade to cover the bank bailout, fiscal stimulus and deficits in Social Security and Medicare, the dollar's reserve status depends on emerging markets' continued willingness to accumulate U.S. liabilities rather than switching to other stores of value, such as the euro or the IMF's Special Drawing Right (SDR).

As the largest buyer of U.S. Treasury securities, China can break the dollar's reserve currency status any time it wants. But it would risk large losses on the stock of U.S. debt that it has bought already. The resulting unstable stability is the foreign exchange version of the Cold War stalemate based on "mutually assured destruction".

Senior Chinese officials have given off mixed signals about their intentions.

When pressed, officials have indicated China will continue to stand by the dollar in the short term and denied the country has begun to diversify its official holdings. But that has not stopped People's Bank of China (PBOC) Governor Zhou Xiaochuan floating the idea of shifting to a super-sovereign currency based around the SDR.

Zhou's call for diversification was repeated last week in the central bank's annual stability report, which noted that "an international monetary system dominated by a single sovereign currency has intensified the concentration of risk and spread of the crisis". It went on to urge the IMF to exercise closer supervision of the economic and financial policies of major reserve-issuing countries.

Chinese officials have bluntly expressed concern about U.S. fiscal and monetary policies that appear to contemplate inflation and devaluation as a way out of the debt crisis, or at least accept it with weary resignation.

China has started backing a variety of small projects designed to encourage greater "internationalisation" of its currency (such as an active RMB market in Hong Kong and bilateral discussions with Latin American countries on the use of RMB to settle trade transactions).

The question is whether China is preparing to deliver the "coup de grace".

Pressing for a reserve currency discussion at the expanded G8 summit (which will also be attended by India, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and Egypt) suggests China's leaders are serious. They must have known that just pushing the issue onto the agenda would rekindle market fears about the dollar's value.

But it could also be an attempt to create leverage and seize the initiative as part of wider efforts to shape the international financial agenda.

In the past, G8 summits have been structured as a monologue from the advanced industrial economies to the developing world. But following the debt crisis, the leading emerging markets are in no mood to be lectured.

By putting the dollar into play, China's government may hope to pre-empt pressure from western countries for a revaluation of the RMB, and take exchange rate discussions off the table entirely.
It is also a sign China is ready to begin flexing its financial muscle and will have to be treated as an equal alongside the United States, EU and Japan, shaping as much as responding to the policy debate.

The dollar's reserve status has become highly conditional, one of a number of items to be bargained over as part of the international financial agenda. Past experience suggests that when reserve currencies become highly contingent in this way, it marks the beginning of the end.

The dollar will not lose its reserve status completely. But it is set to become less "special". In future it will have to share its reserve status with the euro, the yen and perhaps even in time the yuan.