For a while, this human tragedy was masked by the easy money policies of Greenspan and Bernanke and the resulting euphoria of credit card spending, rising home prices, rising stock prices and large no-down-payment mortgages for all comers. Although there were some complaints about Chinese currency manipulation and lost American jobs in 2004 and 2005, these complaints were muted by the highly visible but ultimately nonsustainable prosperity of those years resulting from the easy money. When the music stopped abruptly in 2007 and the United States careened into the Panic of 2008, there was no longer a place for Chinese policy makers to hide.
Now U.S. politicians, led most noisily by Senator Charles Schumer, publicly attacked the pegging of the yuan-dollar exchange rate and blamed the Chinese for lost jobs in the United States. A bipartisan group of U.S. senators, including Schumer, wrote a letter to the Bush White House in 2008, stating, “The unfair price advantage that the undervalued [Chinese currency] gives Chinese firms has forced many American companies to declare bankruptcy or even go out of business, harming our workers, families and middle class.” Senator Schumer and his ilk were undaunted by the fact that there is scant evidence to support this linkage between jobs and exchange rates. It seems unlikely that the typical North Carolina furniture maker would be willing to work for the $118 per month made by his Chinese counterpart. Even if the yuan doubled in value, the Chinese furniture maker would earn only the equivalent of $236 per month—still not high enough to make his U.S. counterpart competitive. None of this mattered to the dollar demagogues. In their view, the Chinese currency was clearly to blame and now the Chinese must respond to their demands for revaluation.
The administration of President George W. Bush was well aware of this chorus of complaints but was also attuned to the importance of close relations with China on a number of other issues. China was the largest purchaser of Iranian oil exports and was therefore in a position to influence Iran in its confrontation with the United States over nuclear weapons development. China was an indispensible economic lifeline to the hermetically sealed regime of North Korea, with which it shared a common border, and so was also in a position to help the United States achieve its strategic goals on the Korean peninsula. Large U.S. corporations eyed the Chinese market enviously and were looking for direct market access through expansion, acquisitions or joint ventures with Chinese partners, all of which required Chinese government approvals. China had suffered a loss of face in 2005 when the China National Offshore Oil Corporation withdrew its takeover bid for U.S.-based Unocal Oil after the U.S. House of Representatives voted 398–15 to call on President Bush to review the bid on national security grounds. Such rejections could easily result in tit-for-tat denial of U.S. acquisitions in China. In short, America had as much to lose as to gain from any confrontation with China, and a continuing high-level expert dialogue seemed like a more fruitful approach.
President Bush addressed the need to keep U.S.-Chinese currency tensions under control by launching the China-U.S. Strategic Economic Dialogue in 2006. These meetings were continued by the Obama administration in expanded form and renamed the Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED) to reflect the inclusion of the U.S. secretary of state and a Chinese state councilor with responsibility for foreign policy. The inclusion of foreign policy officials along with economic officials was a clear recognition of the interconnectedness of the geopolitical and financial aspects of national policy in the twenty-first century.
The Strategic and Economic Dialogue was one of several bilateral and multilateral forums designed in part to deal with the advent of a new currency war. It has helped to avoid an escalation in tensions over the currency manipulation charges, but has done nothing to make the issue go away. A series of bilateral summits between President Hu of China and President Obama of the United States were also convened, but neither the S&ED nor the bilateral summits have produced major progress.
The United States has now chosen the G20 as the main arena to push China in the direction of revaluation, both because of the possibility of attracting allies to join the effort and because the Chinese are more deferential to global opinion than to U.S. opinion alone. Recent significant progress on yuan revaluation has tended to occur not in conjunction with S&ED meetings but rather in advance of G20 meetings. For example, a small but still noteworthy revaluation of the yuan from 6.83 on June 15, 2010, to 6.79 on June 25, 2010, occurred immediately in advance of the G20 leaders’ summit in Toronto. Another rally in the yuan from 6.69 on November 1, 2010, to 6.62 on November 11, 2010, coincided with the G20 leaders’ summit in Seoul. This demonstrates that the Chinese are attentive to the G20 in ways that they may not be when it comes to other forums.
By the spring of 2011 the U.S.-China Pacific theater in the currency war was quiet. However, the core issues were still unresolved. Employment stress in both China and the United States meant that tensions could erupt at any time. A leadership change in China in 2012 and a presidential election in the United States the same year raised the specter of domestic political forces being a catalyst for further international confrontation.
The Atlantic Theater
The Atlantic theater, the relationship between the dollar and the euro, is better understood as one of codependence rather than confrontation. This is because of the much larger scale and degree of interconnectedness between U.S. and European capital markets and banking systems compared to any other pair of financial relationships in the world. This interdependence was never on more vivid display than in the immediate aftermath of the bankruptcy of the Lehman Brothers investment bank in September 2008. Although the bankruptcy was filed in U.S. federal courts after a failed bailout attempt led by the U.S. Treasury, some of the largest financial victims and worst-affected parties were European hedge funds that had done over-the-counter swaps business or maintained clearing accounts at Lehman’s London affiliates. This transatlantic fiasco, heavily reported at the time, was amplified in December 2010 when the Fed, in response to disclosures required by the new Dodd-Frank Act, released extensive details of its emergency lending and bailout operations to Europe during the Panic of 2008.
The euro-dollar exchange rate in early 2011 was almost exactly where it was in 2007. The euro was worth $1.30 in early January 2007 and traded right around $1.30 four years later, but this equivalence should not be mistaken for stability. In fact the euro-dollar relationship has been highly volatile, with the euro trading as high as $1.59 in July 2008 and as low as $1.10 in June 2010.
The euro and dollar are best understood as two passengers on the same ship. At any given time, one passenger may be on a higher deck and the other on a lower one. They can change places at will and move higher or lower relative to each other, but at the end of the day they are on the same vessel moving at the same speed heading for the same destination. The day-to-day fluctuations reflect technical factors, short-term supply and demand requirements, fears of default or disintegration of the euro followed quickly by relief at the latest rescue or bailout package. Through it all, the euro-dollar pair travel on, never separated by more than the dimensions of the vessel on which they both sail.
The United States nevertheless has its hands full on the currency war’s Atlantic front, not in trying to strengthen the euro excessively but rather in making sure it does not fall apart altogether. The euro itself is a kind of miracle of modern monetary creation, having been invented by the members of the European Union after thirty years of discussion and ten years of intensive technical study and planning. It was the capstone of a European project begun after World War II and intended to preserve the peace.
Beginning at the end of the Renaissance in the mid-sixteenth century, Europe had been racked for over four hundred years by the battles waged during the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Thirty Years’ War, the English Revolution, the wars of Louis XIV, the Seven Years’ War, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the Franco-Prussian War, World War I, World War II, the Holocaust, the dropping of the Iron Curtain and the nuclear terror of the Cold War. By the late twentieth century, Europe was highly cynical about nationalist claims and the potential for military advantage. The old ethnic, national and religious divides were still there. What was needed was a unifying force—something that would tie economies so closely together that war would be unthinkable, if not impossible.
Starting with the six-nation Coal and Steel Community in 1951, Europe progressed through various forms of free trade areas, common markets and monetary systems. The Maastricht Treaty of 1992, named after the city in the Netherlands where it was negotiated and signed, provided for the formation of a political entity, the European Union, and ultimately led to the creation of the euro in 1999. The euro was to be issued by the new European Central Bank. By 2011, the euro was used by seventeen member states.
Yet from the start, analysts warned that a single currency backed by a single central bank was incompatible with the diverse fiscal policies of the member countries adopting the euro. Countries that had historically been profligate and had defaulted on debt or devalued their currencies, such as Greece or Spain, would be awkward partners in a union that included fiscally prudent countries like Germany.
It took ten years for all the flaws in this grand scheme to be fully revealed, although they were there from the start. A toxic combination of venal government ministers, Wall Street hit-and-run derivatives scam artists and willfully blind European Union officials in Brussels allowed countries such as Greece to run deficits and borrow at levels far in excess of Maastricht Treaty limits while burying the true costs in out years and off-balance-sheet contracts. Meanwhile investors happily snapped up billions of euros in sovereign debt from the likes of Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland and other eurozone member states at interest rates only slightly higher than solid credits such as Germany. This was done on the basis of high ratings from incompetent ratings agencies, misleading financial statements from government ministries and wishful thinking by investors that a euro sovereign would never default.
The path to the 2010 European sovereign debt crisis was partly the fruit of a new entente among banks, borrowers and bureaucrats. The banks would buy the European sovereign bonds and book the related profits secure in the belief that no sovereign would be allowed to fail. The sovereigns happily issued the bonds in order to finance nonsustainable spending that largely benefitted public unions. The interests of the bureaucrats in Brussels were perhaps most insidious of all. If the European sovereign debt crisis resolved itself, everyone would praise the success of the euro project. If some European sovereign debt failed, the bureaucrats’ solution would be more, not less, integration and more, not less, oversight from Brussels. By turning a blind eye to the recklessness, Brussels had constructed a no-lose situation. If the euro succeeded they won praise and if the euro came under stress they won power. The stress came soon enough.
The European banks gorged not only on euro sovereign debt but also on debt issued by Fannie Mae and the full alphabet soup of fraudulent Wall Street structured products such as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs. These debts were originated by inexperienced local bankers around the United States and repackaged in the billions of dollars by the likes of Lehman Brothers before they went bust. The European banks were the true weak links in the global financial system, weaker even than Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and the other bailed-out icons of American finance.
By 2010, European sovereign finance was a complex web composed of cross-holdings of debt. Of the $236 billion of Greek debt, $15 billion was owed to UK entities, $75 billion was owed to French entities and $45 billion was owed to German entities. Of the $867 billion of Irish debt, $60 billion was owed to French entities, $188 billion was owed to UK entities and $184 billion was owed to German entities. Of the $1.1 trillion of Spanish debt, $114 billion was owed to UK entities, $220 billion was owed to French entities and $238 billion was owed to German entities. The same pattern prevailed in Italy, Portugal and the other heavily indebted members of the euro system. The mother of all inter-European debts was the $511 billion that Italy owed to France.
While this sovereign debt was owed to a variety of institutions, including pension funds and endowments, the vast majority was owed to other countries’ banks. This was the reason for the Fed’s secret bailout of Europe in 2008 and why the Fed fought so hard to keep the details confidential until some of it was forced into the open by the Dodd-Frank legislation of 2010. This was the reason Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bondholders never took any losses when those companies were bailed out by the U.S. taxpayers in 2008. This was why the leading states, Germany and France, rallied quickly to prop up sovereign borrowers in the periphery such as Greece, Ireland and Portugal when the euro sovereign crisis reached a critical stage in 2010. The impetus behind all three bailouts was that the European banking system was insolvent. Subsidizing Greek pensioners and Irish banks was a small price to pay to avoid watching the whole rotten edifice collapse.
However, in the European sovereign debt crisis, Europe was not alone. Both the United States and China supported the European bailouts for different but ultimately self-interested reasons. Europe is a massive export market for the United States. A strong euro keeps up the European appetite for U.S. machines, aircraft, pharmaceuticals, software, agricultural produce, education and the variety of goods and services the United States has to offer. A collapse of the euro would mean a collapse in trade between the two giants of global output. A collapse of a European sovereign could take down the European banks and the euro with it, as investors instantaneously developed a revulsion for all debt denominated in euros and fled from European banks. The consequences of a European sovereign debt default for U.S. exporters to Europe would be too great; here was an entire continent that was too big too fail. The U.S. bailouts, swap lines and support for issuers like Fannie Mae were all part of a multifaceted, multiyear effort to prop up the value of the euro.