Il nuovo anno, come vedete, si era aperto come era finito il vecchio anno. Titoli di quotidiani e TV centrati sulle tariffe, variazioni sempre microscopiche ed insignificanti degli indici di Borsa a New York, e tutti gli altri indici di Borsa dietro a quelli americani.

E Trump aveva scritto ovviamente che “tutto va bene con la Cina” e che “firmeremo presto”. Anzi, esattamente il 15 gennaio.

Prontamente poi uno degli uomini della Amministrazione era andato alla TV della propaganda, ovvero CNBC, a comunicare che “il Presidente ha deciso che l’indice Dow Jones International arriverà a 32000 punti a fine 2020”. Aggiungendo: “come minimo”, nel senso che si potrebbe anche fare meglio di così. C’è sempre la speranza.

Nelle successive 24 ore però il quadro si è radicalmente modificato, nel senso che vedete sotto: in verde adesso ci sono i titoli legati alla guerra (armamenti) mentre gli indici sono in rosso.

In questo Post, però, noi intendiamo restare sulla Cina, sulle tariffe, e sul commercio internazionale: e per questo, scegliamo di mettere per ora da parte il tema della tensione geopolitica.

Lo facciamo riproponendovi un articolo di Stephen Roach, che vi abbiamo presentato già sette giorni fa (potete anche utilizzare il link qui sotto): l’articolo non tiene conto degli scenari di guerra, perché fu scritto due mesi fa, ma risulta utilissimo anche a due mesi di distanza perché fa il punto in modo efficace sulle tariffe e sui rapporti di forza tra USA e Cina.

Come sempre, chiediamo al lettore la pazienza di leggere in inglese, per le ragioni che abbiamo già spiegato.

Oct 25, 2019 STEPHEN S. ROACH

The real problem with the phase one accord announced on October 11 is the basic structure of the deal into which it presumably fits. From trade to currency, the approach is the same – prescribing bilateral remedies for multilateral problems.

NEW HAVEN – Dealmakers always know when to cut their losses. And so it is with the self-proclaimed greatest dealmaker of them all: US President Donald Trump. Having promised a Grand Deal with China, the 13th round of bilateral trade negotiations ended on October 11 with barely a whimper, yielding a watered-down partial agreement: the “phase one” accord.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. The Trump administration’s three-pronged negotiating strategy has long featured a major reduction in the bilateral trade deficit, a conflict-resolution framework to address problems ranging from alleged intellectual-property theft and forced technology transfer to services reforms and so-called non-tariff barriers, along with a tough enforcement mechanism. According to one of the lead US negotiators, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, the Grand Deal was about 90% done in May, before it all unraveled in a contentious blame game and a further escalation of tit-for-tat tariffs.

But hope springs eternal. As both economies started to show visible signs of distress, there was new optimism that reason would finally prevail, even in the face of an escalating weaponization of policy by the United States: threatened capital controls, rumored delisting of Chinese companies whose shares trade on American stock exchanges, new visa restrictions, a sharp expansion of blacklisted Chinese firms on the dreaded Entity List, and talk of congressional passage of the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019. Financial markets looked the other way and soared in anticipation in the days leading up to the October 11 announcement.

And yet the phase one deal announced with great fanfare is a huge disappointment. For starters, there is no codified agreement or clarity on enforcement. There is only a vague promise to clarify in the coming weeks Chinese intentions to purchase about $40-50 billion worth of US agricultural products, a nod in the direction of a relatively meaningless agreement on currency manipulation, and some hints of initiatives on IP protection and financial-sector liberalization. And for that, the Chinese get a major concession: a second reprieve on a new round of tariffs on exports to the US worth some $250 billion that was initially supposed to take effect on October 1.

Far from a breakthrough, these loose commitments, like comparable earlier promises, offer little of substance. For years, China has long embraced the “fat-wallet” approach when it comes to defusing trade tensions with the US. In the past, that meant boosting imports of American aircraft; today, it means buying more soybeans. Of course, it has an even longer shopping list of US-made products, especially those tied to telecommunications equipment maker Huawei’s technology supply chain.

But China’s open wallet won’t solve America’s far deeper economic problems. The $879 billion US merchandise trade deficit in 2018 (running at $919 billion in the second quarter of 2019) reflects trade imbalances with 102 countries. This is a multilateral problem, not the China-centric bilateral problem that politicians insist must be addressed in order to assuage all that ails American manufacturers and workers. Yet without resolving the macroeconomic imbalances that underpin this multilateral trade deficit – namely, a chronic shortfall of domestic saving – all a China fix could accomplish would be a diversion of trade to higher-cost foreign producers, which would be the functional equivalent of a tax hike on US consumers.

Promises of a currency agreement are equally suspicious. This is an easy, but unnecessary, add-on to any deal. While the renminbi’s exchange rate against the US dollar has fallen by 11% since the trade war commenced in March 2018, it is up 46% in inflation-adjusted terms against a broad constellation of China’s trading partners since the end of 2004. Like trade, currencies must be assessed from a multilateral perspective to judge whether a country is manipulating its exchange rate to gain an unfair competitive advantage.

That assessment makes it quite clear that China does not meet the widely accepted criteria for currency manipulation. Its once-outsize current-account surplus has all but disappeared, and there is no evidence of any overt official intervention in foreign-exchange markets. In August, the International Monetary Fund reaffirmed that very conclusion in its so-called Article IV review of China. Although the US Treasury recently deemed China guilty of currency manipulation, this verdict was at odds with the Treasury’s own criteria, and Mnuchin is now hinting that it may be reversed. Far from essential, a new currency agreement is nothing more than a feeble grab for political bragging rights.

The real problem with the phase one accord is the basic structure of the deal into which it presumably fits. From trade to currency, the approach is the same – prescribing bilateral remedies for multilateral problems. That won’t work. Multilateral problems require solutions aimed at the macroeconomic imbalances on which they rest. That could mean a reciprocal market-opening framework like a bilateral investment treaty or a rebalancing of saving disparities between the two countries that occupy the extremes on the saving spectrum.

The saving issue is especially critical for the US. America’s net domestic saving rate of just 2.2% of national income in the second quarter of 2019 is far short of the 6.3% average in the final three decades of the twentieth century. Boosting saving – precisely the opposite of what the US is doing in light of the ominous trajectory of its budget deficit – would be the most effective means by far to reduce America’s multilateral trade imbalance with China and 101 other countries. Doing so would also take the misdirected focus off a bilateral assessment of the dollar in a multilateral world.

A macro perspective is always tough for politicians. That is especially true today in the US, because it doesn’t fit neatly with xenophobic bilateral fixations, like China bashing. With new signs of Chinese resistance now surfacing, the phase one accord may never see the light of day. But if it does, it will hurt more than it helps in addressing one of the world’s toughest current economic problems.

Stephen S. Roach, a faculty member at Yale University and former Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, is the author of Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China.

Quand'è che si firma per 'ste tariffe?