It is ironic that China is demanding greater control of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, just as the nation’s banking system is about to be devastated by the white hot flames of inflation.
From a distance, China’s economy seems to be the poster child of sustainable growth. Recent government reports show the economy expanding by 9.7%, retail sales up a blistering 17.4%, foreign reserves at $3 trillion, and inflation only 5.4%. But these statistics mask a dark side; Chinese communist authorities have been artificially holding down fierce inflationary pressures by subsidizing consumer prices.

Over the last six months the government artificially restricted increases in retail food prices to 11%, while wholesale commodity food prices have jumped by 35%. In the last two months the government capped retail gasoline price increases at 10%, even as Middle East turmoil caused crude oil prices to leap by over 30%.
Most Americans believe that the secret-weapon of the “China Economic Miracle” has been currency manipulation of Chinese yuan’s exchange rate with the U.S. dollar. In the past two years as Asian economies and foreign exchange reserves expanded dramatically, the yuan gained only 4.6% versus the dollar. This modest rise compares currency gains of 31% for the Indonesian rupiah, 22% for the South Korean won, and 21%for the Singapore dollar. China has subsidized its exporters by recycling its export earnings back into over-valued U.S. dollars. The strategy makes China’s exports more competitive, but at the cost of spiking inflation at home.

The less known and far more important secret-weapon of the “China Economic Miracle” is the absolute control of the banking industry by China’s four largest state-owned banks (“SOB”); Industrial and Commercial Bank, Agricultural Bank, People’s Bank of China and Construction. Since the government does not provide adequate social welfare programs and restricts its citizen’s investment options to bank accounts, about 40% of Chinese household income is deposited in SOBs each month. The SOBs then leverage the deposits by ten times and loan 75% of this massive amount of cash at extremely low interest rates to state-owned-enterprises (“SOE”). The other 25% of lending is allocated to real estate development.

China is no stranger to bankers making risky loans to communist party officials and their crony real estate developers. During the Asian Financial Crisis of the mid-1990s, it is estimated that 40% of all SOB loans were non-performing and most were written off. The Chinese paid for the SOB losses with a 76% devaluation of their currency that crushed the people’s buying-power by 76%. From 1997 to 2004 Chinese frivolous lending was somewhat restrained, but since 2003 the bureaucrats have mandated a massive expansion of lending. In comparison to the U.S. and Europe where bank lending is flat, SOBs have been expanding loans by 25% annually.

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To listen to the debates on the deficit and the debt, one would think that wealth emanates from the government. Underlying every argument is the notion that government cuts imply pain and pose a drastic threat to our economy.

But government spending itself is pain because all money spent by the government represents the confiscation of today’s wealth or future wealth, via direct taxation, currency devaluation or debt ad infinitum. By taking current wealth out of private hands, it is allocated not according to a market economy driven by the people but by a political economy in which “investment” yields returns solely for the politicians in the form of votes and favored classes in the form of monetary or regulatory handouts; by devaluation, savers are wiped out and borrowers and spenders are rewarded, a sure-fire way to bankrupt a people, given that economies grow through savings and investment, not consumption; by piling on the debt, the government pushes up interest rates for all of us, leading investment to flow out of the US and crushing corporations and individuals alike.

All government today rests upon a premise that people should be lucky that they get to keep a percentage of the fruits of their labor, with government rightfully conferring benefits on the interests that support it. Which is why it was never intended for government to be in the business of conferring benefits in the first place – and I mean benefits to anyone, be it labor unions, corporations or particular classes of people.

The burden should have always been on the politician to prove to his elector why ANY dollar taken from the individual should be redistributed to someone else. For government’s clearly defined bounds were created to ensure that the usurpation of wealth from private citizens would be minimal, and occur only when it supported a service that all people benefitted equally from, such as our national defense.

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From the New York Times:

And as officials frenetically tried to paper over differences among the Group of 20 members with a vaguely worded communiqué to be issued Friday, there was no way to avoid discussion of the fundamental differences of economic strategy. After five largely harmonious meetings in the past two years to deal with the most severe downturn since the Depression, major disputes broke out between Washington and China, Britain, Germany and Brazil.

Each rejected core elements of Mr. Obama’s strategy of stimulating growth before focusing on deficit reduction. Several major nations continued to accuse the Federal Reserve of deliberately devaluing the dollar last week in an effort to put the costs of America’s competitive troubles on trading partners, rather than taking politically tough measures to rein in spending at home.

The result was that Mr. Obama repeatedly found himself on the defensive.

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