James Saft

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

China may be about to teach the world another lesson about what happens when speculative money learns that its favored markets aren’t panning out.

In the U.S. in 2007 the subprime bubble collapsed into a still-smoldering heap when borrowers and speculators realized that real estate was topping out.

In China speculative investments including so-called “private lending” don’t promise an exact repeat but have enough elements in common to make the two situations rhyme.

One possible side effect: in a worst-case scenario the yuan CNY= might actually start to fall against the dollar.

A fascinating report released this month by Hong Kong-based strategists at Bank of America Merrill Lynch led by David Cui laid out the dynamics.

“The biggest issue for investors in China is a combination of excess liquidity and lackluster real returns; a persistent negative interest rate has resulted in speculation in financial assets (including property) while returns of the underlying “hard” assets that these financial products are built upon are getting worse,” Cui wrote in a note to clients.

“As a result, any abrupt change in investor sentiment could pull down financial asset prices sharply.”

Despite high inflation, banking and monetary policy have kept the deposit rates offered to Chinese savers quite low, resulting in a negative effective real interest rate. China is awash in liquidity, at least some of it hot money that has flowed in anticipation of the yuan going up in value. But a comparison of the one-year deposit rate and consumer inflation show that savers have been suffering negative interest rates for the past 20 months, effectively paying the banks several percentage points a year for the privilege of lending them their money.

Seeking better treatment, huge amounts of money have flowed outside of the banking sector, into trust accounts and into private lending. Private lending, done by wealthy individuals, state-owned enterprises and private companies, is a huge and growing sector. Loans are made privately, at very high interest rates, to businesses, property developers and in some cases to speculators in property or on financial markets.

The share of Chinese household savings in alternative investments, which includes private lending, has risen from 2 percent of household savings in 2009 to 7 percent in 2011. Overall underground lending is now estimated by BofA ML to be about equal to one fifth of bank lending, in other words huge.

HIGH RATES, HIGH RISK

And because the official bank lending market is constrained, and also somewhat corrupt, private lenders are able to charge huge interest rates of up to 36 percent annually. An August survey by the People’s Bank of China into private lending in Wenzhou showed that 20 percent of the money went into property, helping to keep aloft the very high real estate valuations in China.

But here’s the rub: if you charge 25 to 30 percent interest, the people you are lending money to either have to make a killing or very quickly they will default. As in the latter subprime days you don’t need a crash to cause a crash, you only need prices to level out and the crash eventually ensues as people can’t afford the high rates. And while Chinese borrowers put down far more than American ones in down payments, they may prove unwilling to cede their equity to private lenders.

The process of weakening may already be beginning, as shown in the sharp falls in shares in China, particularly financial ones. A unit of China’s $400 billion sovereign wealth fund waded into the market on Monday to purchase shares in the country’s four largest banks after prices dropped to crisis levels.

There are a host of other systemic risks that could shock China’s system, according to BofA ML. Besides falling property prices, there is the possibility that money found its way into outright Ponzi schemes, or that private businesses that were eager to borrow the money run into slight difficulties and simply can’t make the payments.

Another possibility is that exports in China get hit by events in Europe or the U.S. This could cause financial market upsets in China and encourage some of the hot money betting on yuan appreciation to flee. If hot money sells up assets or calls in loans, property prices could fall, weakening banks and reinforcing the negative cycle. The end result might be a reversal of China’s policy of slow appreciation in the yuan, despite intense international pressure.

China wants to send powerful signals, such as its share buying, that it won’t stand by and allow a scenario like this to come to pass. That’s probably the central scenario, but like Las Vegas real estate five years ago, China has enough of the Wild West about it that it bears watching.

(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.)

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

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. – Right about now, even the most committed capitalist investor ought to be hoping for one thing: that labor soon has the upper hand.

That’s because the whole edifice: the global economy, the consumption-based developed economies and the share prices they power are crumbling because average workers simply haven’t got enough earning and buying power to play their central role.

Wages in the U.S., for example, have been stagnant for the best part of 40 years, during which time the consumption merry-go-round has only been kept spinning through a combination of artificially high asset prices and spending borrowed money.

Consumer incomes actually fell in August for the first time in almost two years, according to new data, and consumer spending only eked out a modest gain due to a sharp fall in the savings rate. Given that people are living longer and have stressed balance sheets, dis-saving is a tactic that will only work for so long.

This state of affairs has allowed corporate profits, as a share of the economy, to hit their highest point in the second quarter since records began in 1947, and on track to hit an annual high since at least 1929. Even the stock market no longer sees that as evidence of rude health, as shown by the steady, grinding decline in prices relative to earnings.

To be sure, this long-term stagnation in wages is in substantial part because of globalization. Some of what labor in the developed world lost has been converted to gains for labor in emerging markets, where income has surged over the past decade. Nonetheless, the system is predicated on consumption in the west and that consumption is crimped by stagnant incomes and high debt loads.

Up to a point this will be self-correcting. Wages in China, for example, have grown strongly, which will eventually lead to domestic consumption there and to a balancing out in the relative costs of production. Sadly, that long-term solution is not going to arrive in time to save this morning’s equity investors, which is perhaps why so many of them are deciding to become this afternoon’s debt investors.

This is the catch for equities; a vibrant economy depends on a rebalancing of negotiating power between labor and capital, but that very process is going to undermine corporate profits, and with them stock prices. The best strategy may well be to remain structurally underweight equities until that rebalancing has happened or until the stock market moves ahead to price it in.

UNSUPPORTIVE POLICY

There has, rightly, been a great focus on debt in the current malaise, with much head-scratching over how to deal with Greek sovereign debt and individual mortgage debt. That’s natural because debts come due and when defaulted upon have a nasty habit of causing a chain of defaults through the economy. Even so, the focus then has been on how to protect debt holders from the consequences of their foolishness and the foolishness of the parties they loaned money to.

“Almost all remedies proposed by global authorities to date have approached the problem from the standpoint of favoring capital as opposed to labor,” bond giant Bill Gross of Pimco wrote in a note to clients.

“If the banks could just be stabilized, if the ‘markets’ could just be elevated back in the direction of peak 401(k) levels, if interest rates could just be lower so that borrowers would inevitably take the bait, then labor — job creation — would inevitably follow. It has not.”

In the case of Greece, that is because austerity only makes it weaker and less able to bear the debt’s burden. In the case of over-indebted mortgage holders it is because most loan modifications leave the borrower with more than they can afford.

All of what we are describing is deflationary, which makes the epic rally in government bonds seem not so much a bubble as a down payment on future gains.

Investors hoping, as they will and as they should, to make profits need to get some things straight in their own minds: who, exactly, is going to buy all of these goods and services and where are they going to get the money?

It is not clear that monetary policy can address this. Its success rate so far is not great. It is far less clear that fiscal policy will even be given a chance.

It is reasonable to expect that eventually western labor will make gains, and that emerging market labor’s new buying power will slowly build and provide a buttress to global demand. That’s not happening any time soon, to judge by the run of events, which is a good reason to remain shy of equities.

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.

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

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — With QE2 set to end in five weeks and with Greece rolling downhill towards default, the world is not best placed to withstand a weakening economy.

That, however, is exactly what looks to be happening, as Asian demand is hit by a cooling China and a struggling Japan.

Let’s take a look at the evidence:

Japan’s economy shrank by 0.9 percent in the three months to March, battered by the earthquake, tsunami and ongoing nuclear fiasco.

The preliminary HSBC/Markit purchasing managers’ index for China fell to 51.1 in May from a final reading of 51.8 in April, holding in expansionary territory above 50 but amidst growing evidence that China is coming off the boil. Chinese demand for raw materials and semi-finished products has been one of the global economy’s principal supports, but now a monetary policy tightening campaign may be gaining traction.

The Chicago Fed national index, derived itself from 85 economic indicators, came in at negative 0.45 in April compared to 0.32 in March. There are numerous signals of an industrial slowdown in the U.S., while the housing market continues to weaken, threatening financial stability and consumer spending.

Finally, in Europe the euro zone composite flash PMI, an indicator combining service sector and manufacturing purchasing, fell to 55.4 from 57.8. More worryingly, the headline manufacturing index had its biggest fall since Lehman Brothers failed, falling by 3.1 points to 54.8.

“All in all it seems to us that the odds are high that a domestic and global economic slowdown is already in place.  In the U.S. the slowdown is happening with only weeks to go before the end of QE2, a program that has been a major prop for even the tepid recovery we’ve undergone so far,” said Charlie Minter of fund managers Comstock Partners in a note to clients.

“For the stock market nothing seems to matter until, suddenly, it does.”

It has begun to matter recently to the stock market, which has fallen in recent sessions after a sustained rally. The bond market has already figured this out; since mid-April U.S. 10-year yields are down more than 12 percent to 3.12 percent. Given that the U.S. debt market faces a debt showdown and the end of QE2, both factors which should theoretically send yields higher, this slide in yields shows real doubts about future growth.

CRUEL SUMMER

It is worth noting that the euro zone’s woes were not this time concentrated in the weak peripheral states; this time Germany got whacked too. That may well reflect the wrench thrown into production from Japanese plant closings, which in itself will self-correct. It is also likely reflecting a slowdown in demand for German products from China. If you believe that Chinese demand was artificially boosted by very easy credit, and that Chinese demand in turn was driving global growth, then this is an indicator of a very busy and volatile summer in financial markets.

Global markets have ignored, more or less, the euro zone’s issues for more than a year, but did so in a very supportive atmosphere. The Federal Reserve was buying up Treasuries, sending cash into risk markets in waves, while China continued to grow at a blistering pace. It may be that China is important not just because its slowdown affects demand, but because it lets investors focus on the actual prospects in the euro zone.

Will Germany and France be as willing to foot the bill for Greece if their own manufacturing bases begin to shrink? It is possible but a lot less likely.

Meanwhile the crisis both builds and spreads, with a dispute over debt reprofiling (a sort of doe-eyed default) between the European Central Bank and European officials and a fantasy plan by Greece to raise 15 billion euros through asset sales.

Greece may turn out to be a minor worry; Belgium and Italy have been threatened with credit downgrades by Fitch.

So what happens from here? A palatable outcome would be a gentle decline in economic momentum followed by a strong second half. This makes absorbing the impact from Europe easier, and makes it easier for Europe to come to terms with itself.

A less likely, perhaps, but still possible scenario is that the manufacturing slowdown gains speeds just as Europe faces a contagion from the periphery, either to parts of the core, to the banking system of the core, or both.

At this point the Federal Reserve will have an ugly choice; does it extend and expand quantitative easing to support the newly weakening economy, or does it sit tight, brace for the recession and hope something else will turn up?

(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.)

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

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — While the U.S. will fight it kicking and screaming, the dollar’s upcoming fall from its central global role will be a blessing all round.

The World Bank on Tuesday predicted that the dollar will lose its place by 2025 as the principle global reserve currency, to be supplanted by a multipolar world where it, the euro and the yuan will share top billing.

First off, things have come to a sorry pass when the dollar is going to lose out to two currencies of which one, the euro, many people worry may cease to exist, and the other, the yuan, isn’t even properly convertible.

But beneath the ignominy lies a simple truth: being the world’s main reserve currency is a bit like being a pop star; there are lots of fringe benefits but it is very easy to end up in financial rehab.

There are several supposed central benefits to being the world’s principal reserve currency; lower funding costs, a home-field advantage in financial intermediation and better control over one’s own monetary policy. All three have been a mixed blessing, at best, for the U.S. and may yet turn out to be mostly malign.

“Countries whose currencies are key in the international monetary system benefit from domestic macroeconomic policy autonomy, seigniorage revenues, relatively low borrowing costs, a competitive edge in financial markets, and little pressure to adjust their external accounts. It has also produced a potentially destabilizing situation in which (a) the world’s leading economy, the United States, is also the largest debtor, and (b) the world’s largest creditor, China, assumes massive currency mismatch risk in the process of financing U.S. debt,” according to the World Bank’s report titled “Multipolarity: The New Global Economy.”

“Another shortcoming of the current system is that global liquidity is created primarily as the result of the monetary policy decisions that best suit the country issuing the predominant international currency, the United States, rather than with the intention of fully accommodating global demand for liquidity,” it added.

Because people must buy dollars to make many financial transactions, and central banks choose to hold dollars as a store of value, the dollar is too strong, borrowing in dollars is too cheap and there are inadequate controls on unsustainable behavior such as running current account deficits.

IT’S BAD TO BE KING

The U.S., both as a nation and a collection of individuals, would surely have borrowed less and arguably would have invested more if lower demand for the dollar had made real interest rates higher. It has been all the easier to believe fictions like the idea that we can all grow rich by buying each other’s houses when money was so cheap. There is then a direct line between dollar supremacy and the serial bubbles.

That brings us to monetary policy and the supposedly huge benefits of being free to run it the way you see fit. This of course has not always been true, Chinese buying of dollars and Treasuries has meaningfully impaired the Federal Reserve’s ability to control the economy.

Even beyond that, being able to run unimpaired monetary policy is akin to allowing small children to decide exactly what they will eat; they are going to tend to overindulge in sweets and get sick. Now part of that is due to the “heads,  asset holders win, tails, they get bailed out” policies of the Fed, which has concentrated wealth and rewarded people for taking on too much risk. It is impossible to know how the Fed would have acted if the dollar were not king of the hill, but it’s a fair guess to say they would have placed less faith in the benign powers of debt and consumption.

As for having a competitive edge in financial markets, this perhaps has been the real disaster, as America has financialized itself into a place with greater structural risks (think too big to fail), greater income and asset inequality and a hollowed-out manufacturing base.

Now, if you want to know why the world will become financially multipolar you simply need to look at the growth projections the World Bank made for developed markets between now and 2025 — 2.3 percent annually — and the same figure for the emerging world — 4.7 percent. Power and centrality will follow the money.

The new world will not be perfect either. If China opens its economy fully we will see a huge bubble as capital floods in to make money. And if you are not in one of the main currency areas you will face new and complicated issues of volatility and risk.

The key point is that this transition must happen gradually. If the dollar’s reign does end the hard way, all of a sudden in a currency crisis, it will be in large part because of temptations inherent in being number one.

(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.)

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

There are signs that China’s stupendous debt-fueled boom is cooling, posing new risks for global growth and markets.

The People’s Bank of China on Thursday raised the bank reserve requirement ratio to a record 21 percent, a rise of a half a percentage point and the fifth so far this year. The move, effectively a tightening of monetary policy, comes as inflation at 5.3 percent remains high and industrial output slides, albeit to a still high 13.4 percent in the year to April.

China is an economy addicted to investment, a sort of fun house mirror of the U.S.’s addiction to consumption, with an astounding 93 percent of GDP growth in 2009 attributable to investment.

That’s a strategy that worked well for years, but China’s response to the global financial crisis, a sort of all-in push for lending and investment, has led to over-heating, uneconomic projects and possibly now a disruptive slowing of growth.

An estimate by Lombard Street Research of broad money growth, including various banking shenanigans, showed growth equal to 40 percent of GDP in 2010, but falling quickly to 23 percent of GDP in the first quarter. Those figures reflect the tremendous growth of money being pushed through the banking system and through a shadow banking system that grew rapidly last year as banks tried to evade government control. The slowdown is almost as striking as the still heady heights of the growth.

That money powered investment across China into infrastructure, industrial production and real estate, sucking as it did tremendous amounts of raw materials and industrial goods from elsewhere in the world.

If Chinese appetite cools, the effects elsewhere will be large, both in countries like Germany which supply goods and places like Australia which supply materials.

There are complex opposing forces in China, with the central bank applying the brakes but other government authorities deeply ambivalent about the implications of a slowdown in investment.

“Historically one of the key indicators that the high-growth investment-driven model has reached its limits as a wealth creator (i.e. is no longer allocating capital efficiently) is when we see an unsustainable increase in debt,” according to Michael Pettis, a professor of finance at Peking University.

“Of course whether or not we have reached this point is still much debated, but I would argue that we started to see this at least five years ago. The surge in banking assets doesn’t give much comfort.”

BANKING ASSETS HIT RECORD

Total assets in the Chinese banking system grew to 2.39 times Chinese GDP last year, yet another record, driven by heavy state-instigated lending beginning in 2009.

There are also reports of widespread off-balance-sheet maneuvers last year and this by would-be borrowers seeking to raise funds while avoiding official control. The asset figure is likely a large underestimate of both assets and of the stimulative effect debt is having on the economy.

The real problem with the end stages of a debt-financed growth binge is that policy makers are trapped regardless of what action they take. If Chinese authorities stamp on bank lending they are sure to leave many projects halfway completed and in default, a serious blow to an already shaky banking system. If, on the other hand, they allow loans to continue to be made freely we will be looking at much froth and many projects with highly uncertain economic underpinnings and value.

So, if the money actually is slowing what will be hurt? Chinese bank shares are already underperforming western peers, perhaps discounting the possibility of loans going bad if sky-high property prices sag. This looks a distinct possibility: housing sales were down 40 percent in Beijing in the first quarter.

Again, the risk here is that the banking system goes from overdrive to credit crunch if it sees and fears bad loans.

Analysts at Societe Generale suggest that hard commodities, such as copper and iron ore, would be particularly hard hit. If the slowdown is mild we would likely see only the most frothy markets hurt, but in the event of a hard landing, probably not a central scenario this year, the impact would be both big and global.

Longer term the question for China is how it dismounts from the tiger of an investment- and export-oriented economy and makes the transition to one with more domestic consumption. Letting the yuan rise strongly against the dollar would help. A large one-time revaluation of the yuan would also obviously help to control inflation and so might be a possibility.

Unless the transition to a more balanced economy is very gradual it will be disruptive. China, having helped to fuel a bubble in many assets, may well be the catalyst for the corresponding crash.

(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.)

In investing, extreme behavior is becoming more mainstream every day.

How else can we interpret the extraordinary moves by the University of Texas’ endowment fund to not only buy nearly $1 billion of gold, equal to about 5 percent of its assets, but to insist on taking physical delivery of the precious metal.

Things really have come to an interesting juncture when the second-largest academic endowment in the U.S., managed and advised by sober, rational people, decides that what they need is insurance against getting, in essence, robbed, via inflation, by fiscal and monetary policy.

Little wonder that gold futures went above $1,500 per ounce for the first time on Wednesday, driven by a laundry list of concerns starting with a falling dollar and not ending with the growing chance of “debt restructuring” (well, default, if you insist) by Greece.

“The role gold plays in our portfolio is as a hedge against currencies. The concern is that we have excess monetary and fiscal stimulus,” Bruce Zimmerman, chief executive officer of The University of Texas Investment Management Company told CNBC television.

While Zimmerman said it was easier and more economical for the fund to physically accept the gold, which it is paying to store in a vault presumably deep below the sidewalks of New York, rather than the more usual route of buying a derivative contract, the move also must reflect concern about the risk of those contracts not being honored. To that extent the investment is not only protection against inflation and currency risk, but against market failure as well.

Zimmerman has described gold as an “anti-currency,” as,  being in limited supply, its value can’t be degraded by central bank-engineered inflation and devaluation. You can’t turn on the printing presses and make more gold, a slender but apparently important virtue.

That’s a legitimate concern, though the kind of scenario that would only have been raised on the most feverish message boards until a couple of years ago. Since the second round of quantitative easing was signaled last August the dollar has fallen about 11 percent against a trade-weighted basket of currencies.

The dollar has fallen particularly hard in recent days, even against the beleaguered euro, after Standard & Poor’s put the U.S. on warning that it has a one-in-three chance of losing its AAA debt rating. Some of the same fears that drove S&P’s move are driving the gold market; the idea that the U.S. will not get its act together to agree budget reform and, in becoming a worse credit, sees the dollar weaken precipitously.

THE ANTI-INVESTMENT
Rather than being an anti-currency, gold is really an anti-investment, not because it can’t pay off, but because it is the one asset that not only protects you against the bad actions of others but actually rewards you for them.

If central bankers and politicians bring on massive inflation, gold goes up. If the U.S. threatens to slouch or leap towards default, gold goes up.

The opposite of buying gold perhaps is to buy equities, because you are betting on creating products, jobs and wealth rather than just protecting yourself. On the other hand, a bar of gold has no executives that can loot the company or accountants that can aid in fraud.  Really the world in which an investment in gold makes you rich is not a very appealing place.

In some ways you can look on capital flowing into gold as a kind of unexpected cost of current monetary policy, just as putting bars on your windows is a cost of living in a dangerous neighborhood. Both divert money away from more productive causes in service to security.

It is really hard to say which is more remarkable; that people are behaving in ways that might have been labeled as paranoid a few years ago or the rise of things that plausibly might make them worried.

The lack of safe alternatives to the dollar is also doubtless driving money to gold. While the euro has rallied against the dollar on expectations of further interest rate rises, its policies towards its ailing member states are in a shambles. There is a real risk that a restructuring by Greece and continued problems in Ireland and Portugal cause contagion to Spain, an economy big enough to call the whole project into question. Electoral gains by a nationalist party in Finland that rejects bailouts only adds to the potential difficulties.

China, though supposedly keen to promote the yuan as an alternative to the dollar, is still partly a closed economy for outside investors. Japan, recovering from disaster and facing huge demographic challenges, is also, though open and big, hardly appetizing.

Gold, then, is a profoundly pessimistic and depressing investment. In current circumstances it also, unfortunately, has a heck of an elevator pitch.

(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. Email: jamessaft@jamessaft.com)

While Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner prepares for a “financial deepening” he hopes will be a boon to U.S. banks, we may be steering instead for broader, shallower waters which will drive down margins in financial services and favor simplicity.

Geithner told The New Republic that he sees a coming boom for demand for financial services from emerging markets as a newly affluent middle class seeks new and more sophisticated financial products.

“I don’t have any enthusiasm for … trying to shrink the relative importance of the financial system in our economy as a test of reform, because we have to think about the fact that we operate in the broader world,” Geithner said.

The vision, perhaps unspoken, is for a recapitalized U.S. banking system with strong enough titans at the top to compete globally to sell complex financial services to Indian corporations as well as Chinese households.

On this reading, the decision to not take effective action to whittle down the too-big-to-fail banks makes sense; the new world will need Citigroups, not community banks.

Besides the false underlying assumption that regulation can mitigate the risks of TBTF banks, the financial deepening thesis is likely wrong on at least two additional counts. First, it assumes that the newly middle class of the world will want the kinds of products that only a huge bank can provide, and second, it assumes that the financial landscape of the future is like that of today, only bigger.

Now, to be sure, if you subsidize something it will grow. So, TBTF banks, enjoying a U.S. backstop and the funding advantage that goes along with it, will have some success in devising products to sell in emerging markets that arbitrage that subsidy. There is doubtless an unmet need for these products in India just as there was an unmet need for liar loans in California’s Central Valley. Look at some of the horrific experience with micro-credit in India, where the poor borrow to simply finance current consumption.

What is not clear is what complex financial services this new world will need, and why only a large global bank enjoying an implied government guarantee will be able to provide it. Certainly there will be capital markets services needed in emerging markets, such as share listings and bond financing, but it is unlikely that the advantage that a TBTF bank will get based on its size alone compared to the cost, to taxpayers and to the economy, is justified. Surely a smaller Goldman Sachs could compete in this arena without an implied guarantee.

A WIDENING
The real action will be not in fancy products devised by math PhDs, though devise them they will, but in simple utility-like functions like transfers and simple risk sharing such as life or property insurance.
Economist Barry Eichengreen, writing in the Wall Street Journal, argues compellingly that the dollar will lose its role as the main global reserve currency over the next decade.

One of the forces he cites is technology, which will make it easy for trade to happen outside of the dollar, for example between Korea and Chile, where before trade had to be routed through the dollar as an intermediary step.

This kind of round tripping into and out of the dollar is one of the main drivers for foreign exchange market volume and for hedging. If it goes away we will not see a deepening, but a shallowing. We would see just as much global trade as before, but a heck of a lot less foreign exchange trading and dollar hedging. The same thing may also be possible in the oil market, which is denominated in dollars and which drives a huge market in foreign exchange and hedging as a result.

It does seem likely that many hundreds of millions of additional people will become consumers of financial services, but like telephony this growing demand will likely come with falling margins.

Think, for example, of the agricultural middlemen in India who have lost their advantage now that farmers can easily access prices via mobile phones. Banks may find themselves in the same position, because of the same forces.

The payments and transfers business will grow tremendously, but this is a utility function and, likely as not, competition from outside of financial services, from technology or communication companies, will drive margins down.

My guess would be that, if the market were left to itself, the financial deepening will belong to Google Bank rather than Citigroup or J.P. Morgan. The too-big-to-fail subsidy may slow or distort that, and that is bad policy.

(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.  Email: jamessaft@jamessaft.com)

Call it what you like — war, tragedy or farce — but the disagreement over global currency exchange rates shows no sign of coming to a peaceful negotiated agreement.

Asked last week if loose Federal Reserve monetary policy was to blame for inflation in emerging markets, Ben Bernanke stoutly denied that it was anything to do with him, maintaining in central banker-speak that he’d been tucked up in bed at home at the time.

“I think it’s entirely unfair to attribute excess demand pressures in emerging markets to U.S. monetary policy, because emerging markets have all the tools they need to address excess demand in those countries,” the Fed chief told reporters assembled at the National Press Club in Washington.

“It’s really up to emerging markets to find appropriate tools to balance their own growth.”

Now on the face of it, that statement is a nonsense: regardless of emerging markets, like say, China, having tools at their disposal to put out the fire of domestic inflation, it is still possible, even likely, that Fed policy is partly responsible for widespread commodity price pressures.

Bernanke is right that rising living standards in emerging markets play an important role in price pressures and right too to point out that emerging markets have unused tools at their disposal.

“They can, for example, use monetary policy of their own. They can adjust their exchange rates, which is something that they’ve been reluctant to do in some cases,” Mr Bernanke said.

Bernanke argued that inflation in the U.S. did not yet appear to be a threat while high rates of unemployment were. Unsaid in this is that China’s policy of artificially keeping the yuan cheap has played a role in high rates of U.S. unemployment.

The U.S. stepped up its rhetoric against Chinese policy in a report from the Treasury Department last week, stopping short of labeling China a currency manipulator but calling the yuan “substantially undervalued” and complaining that “progress thus far is insufficient and that more rapid progress is needed.”

China for its part seems utterly unlikely to do very much to substantially address the issue of a weak yuan, based both on its track record and recent body language.

The truth is that this is a dangerous and destructive way to manage competing global interests, dangerous both in terms of the threats of inflation and hunger and destructive in the ways that Chinese policy has helped to distort the global economy over the past decade, albeit with a massive helping hand from overly loose U.S. policy.

A WIDENING CONFLICT
No one should expect the rest of the world to sit by as the dueling Chinese and American policies spray stray bullets into the crowd.

French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde on Sunday was forthright, blaming a, for her, highly inconvenient strength in the euro on the U.S and the Chinese.

“We must reform the international monetary system so that the euro is not caught in the middle, hit by the expense of trade-offs between two currencies that are deliberately weak,” Ms. Lagarde said in an interview on French television.

And while the word “China” did not pass his lips, U.S. Treasury Secretary Geithner’s meaning was clear on Monday on a visit to Brazil:

“Brazil is seeing a surge in capital inflows. This is happening for two reasons. First, investors around the world see Brazil growing at a faster pace and offering higher rates of return relative to other major economies. But these flows have been magnified by the policies of other emerging economies that are trying to sustain undervalued currencies, with tightly controlled exchange rate regimes.”

That is both true and not true; Chinese policy is terrible for Brazilian industry, threatening to turn the country into a larder for natural resources while suppressing other exports, but a lot of the money which is flooding the country and pressuring its currency upward is part of a huge carry trade that is directly attributable to U.S. monetary policy.

In this way perhaps the real risk of the currency skirmishes is that all countries are so focused on getting their share of global growth that they fail to take individual steps to control inflation, and thus allow it to grow rapidly in a way that proves difficult to control.

It does not have to work out that way; an inflation shock that does not become self-reinforcing will kill asset returns but whittle down debts in a very useful way.

The truth though is many countries are all trying to control the same knife at the same time and that is a tough way to whittle.

(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. Email: jamessaft@jamessaft.com)

If the euro is going to survive without a Depression, German consumers are going to have to behave in ways that are, well, distinctly un-German.

While attention is focused on the suffering that the euro zone debt debacle is inflicting on the weak and the political anger the costs of bailouts are engendering among the strong, it is important to understand that the belt-tightening won’t just be a Gaelic and Mediterranean phenomenon.

German consumers will (rightly) regard events as likely to increase their taxes while doing precious little for their incomes and job prospects. If they react to this like Americans and spend like there is no tomorrow, well then, perhaps the euro zone can handle the local recessions in the Austerity Provinces. If, on the other hand, Germans behave anything like the way they have in the past, they will save more and only increase spending marginally, if at all.

“Over the four quarters to 2011 Q4 it is hard to see (German consumer spending) growth exceeding 1 percent, and easy to see it falling short, especially if budgetary rigour, rising food and energy prices, and the need for further Club Med subsidy provoke the normal reaction from German consumers,” Charles Dumas of Lombard Street Research in London wrote in a note to clients.

Against the wider backdrop this is not encouraging; U.S. demand will be weak, China is trying to stomp on inflation and the euro zone periphery will very likely be contracting. That really does leave German consumers as the engine of euro zone growth — a role that is, for them, unusual.

To put this in context, since the fourth quarter of 2001 German consumer spending is only up a bit more than 2 percent in real terms, a truly measly expansion. During the same period the household savings rate has risen from about 9 percent to just above 11 percent.

During this time, you will recall, the world experienced a go-go real estate bubble with seemingly free money, much of it German in origin, available to plough into collateralized debt obligations and the like.

If German consumers reacted soberly to the good times, imagine what they will do in coming years when confronted with the risks and costs of either staying in or exiting the euro.

Part of the reasons for German consumer reserve was a policy that constrained wage growth savagely, but again, to look for strong wage growth to emerge at this stage is wishful.

NICE RECOVERY?
Much has been made of the fact that Germany’s economy grew strongly last year, rising 3.6 percent, the strongest showing since its east and west were reunified. While this is a fine start, Germany did shrink by 4.7 percent the year before and its economy is still 2 percent smaller in real terms than it was at its peak.

While European, including German, officialdom is absolutely opposed to a euro exit, repeatedly characterising it as disastrous and unthinkable, it might not actually be that bad for German consumers, at least after a while.

Dumas of Lombard Street argues that the hit to competitiveness from a newly risen new-deutschemark would be offset by gains in consumers real income and confidence.

“A higher exchange rate would probably cause a healthy redistribution of income from business to labour, ie, consumers — the lack of which is closely connected to undervaluation and excess savings and net export surpluses in Japan and China, as well as Germany.

“Since Germany is unlikely to follow China’s route of real exchange rate appreciation by means of wage inflation, giving some possibility of a shift to consumption from exports, a break-up of EMU may actually be the only hope for achieving an increase of welfare for ordinary Germans.”

Given the current alignment of opinions that is not the most likely outcome, to put it mildly.

What does seem likely is some combination of the following: a recession among the weak in the euro zone exacerbates and is exacerbated by a failure of German demand in the face of uncertainty and limited global demand.

That will raise the rhetoric of euro zone discord and will weaken the euro, causing a problem for the dollarized world, including China. China’s willingness to spend billions to prop up demand for euro zone debt is in no small part because of this.

Europe will remain a strongly deflationary force in the global economy and the biggest risk in the near term as a force to upset the giddiness that is now dominant in global markets.

(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. Email: jamessaft@jamessaft.com)

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

China’s Christmas day interest rate hike may prove to be bad for global growth but good, at least for a time, for risky assets.

From that perspective, the Chinese policy change could end up being a much-needed helping hand to Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke, who has engineered a policy partly aimed to boost economic growth through the false miracle of asset price inflation.

The Chinese rate hike, taking the benchmark interest rate up by a quarter of a percentage point, signals an increased willingness by Chinese authorities to do what they must to dampen the party domestically. The move increased the one-year lending rate to 5.81 percent and one-year deposit rate to 2.75 percent.

It is aimed at cooling inflation, which is running at 5.1 percent annually on the consumer level, not to mention making itself felt through a booming property market and gold-rush-like appreciation in things like herbal remedies and rare delicacies.

Of course, higher interest rates, while they may cool speculation domestically, will only make China more attractive to international capital, which is already slavering at the prospect of an eventual appreciation of the yuan.

This is well understood within the People’s Bank of China: “Many domestic academics are worried that interest rate rises may accelerate global speculative inflows into China,” Sheng Songcheng, the head of statistics at the PBOC, wrote in a piece published on the bank’s website, warning that these flows were exacerbating inflation.

That implies that China may be steeling itself to more effectively block international capital flows.

But these flows, so-called hot money, don’t just exist because people think China is going to be a good investment over the next few years.

Those flows are, at least in part, a function of the extremely easy monetary policy in the United States and Europe, policy that is aimed at forcing money from the sidelines into risk asset markets. For a time, the easy implication of that easy policy appeared to be a grand carry trade, in which  investors partook of the generous liquidity and terms available in Frankfurt and New York and plonked it down in emerging markets, notably China.

MONEY NEEDS A HOME

China appears to be becoming less hospitable to that money, but it will not cease to exist. It will find a way into other markets, perhaps other emerging markets or places like Australia that are a play on emerging markets. It will also drive the developed markets of Europe and the United States.

This is not because growth prospects have improved in the West — given that Chinese growth may be capped by the rate rise, they haven’t — it is because it is cheap money that is seeking some sort of a home.

Federal Reserve officials have been relatively upfront that the second round of quantitative easing was aimed in part at fomenting a rally in asset prices and with it an increase in consumption and demand. Thanks to the latest PBOC hike, they may find that more of that wealth effect is concentrated in the United States.

This is not to say that a U.S. monetary policy aimed at boosting consumption by inflating asset markets is a good thing; it worked out badly the last 10 years and very likely will work out badly this time as well.

For the time being at least, that will not be in the front of investors’ minds. They will see that markets are going up, and if they are fund managers whose performance is tied to a benchmark, that will compel them to take on risk. This in turn will make a lot of economists inclined to see the glass as half full and the talk will be of how the recovery is becoming something worthy of the name.

One crucial hurdle will be the behavior of companies, which have been sitting on billions in cash and have been reluctant to add jobs even if they have been forced to add hours. Will they see a sustainable increase in demand and put money back to work? Or will it be simply another round of speculative frenzy, profitable for some but disruptive for the economy as a whole?

Ultimately China will likely have to raise rates repeatedly and take other strong steps to brook bank-fueled speculation, none of which will do anything good for global demand.

Even so, unless the market gets a shock, most likely from a troubled euro zone, it is fair to expect risky assets to continue to rally, seemingly without reference to the underlying fundamentals.

(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.)