Board-Ansicht
Mix-Ansicht- Steven Roach zu USD und Leistungsbilanzdefizit interessant Meinungen? - nasdaq, 06.05.2002, 19:15
Steven Roach zu USD und Leistungsbilanzdefizit interessant Meinungen?
Morgan Stanley:
There’s a sharp difference of opinion in Washington these days over the implications of America’s gaping current-account deficit. The Bush Administration has taken a fairly blasé stance, suggesting that the external gap isn’t a big deal -- that it is nothing more than a by-product of a voracious foreign demand for dollar-denominated assets. A few blocks away, the International Monetary Fund puts it quite differently. In its just-released World Economic Outlook, it highlights the US current-account deficit at the top of a list of imbalances that have the clear potential to jeopardize any recovery in the global economy. Who’s got it right?
The answer depends on your perspective. To put it most simply, the White House is relying on a"backcast." whereas the IMF is making a forecast. The Bush administration can hardly be faulted for arguing that the current-account deficit can be financed by the capital-account surplus. This balancing act is one of the pillars of international finance. Every deficit needs to be financed, and, over time, the capital account moves in broad conformity with the current account in order to achieve this equilibrium. Up until recently, the United States has had little difficulty in attracting the heavy volume of capital inflows required to finance its current-account deficit. Courtesy of America’s spectacular economic performance during the latter half of the 1990s, rates of return on dollar-denominated assets were far superior to the alternatives of an otherwise sluggish industrial world. As a result, the United States became a magnet for portfolio flows and foreign direct investment. The Bush Administration believes that this trend will continue. In effect, it is arguing that past performance will be indicative of future returns -- that foreign capital will keep pouring into a high-return US economy in the future as it has in the past.
The IMF position doesn’t dispute what has already happened, but it implies that the future may unfold quite differently. Two key premises underscore this line of reasoning -- the first being that America’s massive current-account deficit is not stable and is likely to widen further in the years ahead. I have a good deal of sympathy with that point of view. Never before has the United States commenced economic recovery with a current-account gap totaling 4% of its GDP. Given the high level of import penetration now structurally embedded in the US economy -- with goods imports at 30% of GDP in early 2002 -- another stretch of US-led global growth will most assuredly result in a significant further widening of the external shortfall. That’s especially the case if the vigor of US domestic demand growth continues the pattern of the late 1990s and far outstrips demand growth elsewhere in the world. That would boost imports more than exports, leading to steady deterioration in the US trade gap. With the trade deficit accounting for more than 80% of the US current-account shortfall in 2001, there is thus every reason to suspect that the latter will widen if recovery takes hold. As a result, our baseline forecast for the US economy continues to look for a current-account deficit that will hit a record of nearly 6% of GDP in 2003.
History suggests -- and now I’m the one guilty of making the backcast -- that such a massive and ever-widening current-account deficit is simply not sustainable. As I noted recently, a Federal Reserve study of some 25 current-account adjustments in the industrial world over the 1980-97 interval reveals that a 5% external gap is usually the trigger point for a reversal (see my 4 April dispatch,"On Current-Account Adjustments"). According to our baseline forecast, the US will cross that threshold by the end of 2002. The forces behind the ultimate current-account reversal are at the heart of the second premise to the IMF case: Massive and ever-widening external imbalances can not be financed easily in perpetuity. They require ever-greater volumes of capital inflows that eventually lead to a point of saturation insofar as foreign holdings of dollar-denominated assets are concerned. That’s all the more pertinent in light of our current-account deficit forecast of nearly 6% of GDP in 2003 -- and its concomitant external financing need of nearly $2 billion of foreign capital inflows per day. If such a massive external funding requirement doesn’t lead to a saturation of the foreign appetite for US assets, I’m not sure what will. Just because America’s external financing was manageable in the 1990s doesn’t mean it will be so as the as the ever-widening current-account deficit now ups the ante on capital inflows. Needless to say, that conclusion is in direct contradiction to that of the capital-flow-driven justification of the Bush Administration.
Interestingly enough, there are signs suggesting that this point of saturation may now be at hand. As Joe Quinlan and Rebecca McCaughrin have recently noted, the portfolio portion of capital inflows into the United States has slowed dramatically in early 2002 (see their 1 May dispatch,"US Portfolio Flows Update -- Precarious Underpinnings"). Over the first two months of this year, foreigners purchased just $27 billion of dollar-denominated assets, a dramatic reduction from the $100 billion pace in the first two months of 2001. Meanwhile, foreign direct investment into the United States -- the other major piece of the capital inflows equation -- has also slowed dramatically. FDI into the US was $158 billion in 2001 -- only a little more than half the $295 billion average pace of 1999 and 2000. Fully two-thirds of this slowdown is traceable to diminished FDI activity from Europe; that’s largely a reflection of a dramatic downshift in the cross-border M&A cycle -- a trend that has continued into the early months of 2002.
One by one, the sources of foreign capital inflows into dollar-denominated assets seem to be drying up. First, it was equities, an understandable by-product of the post-bubble climate. Then it was FDI, reflecting the pronounced downturn in the global M&A cycle. And now it appears that foreign purchases of US bonds are on the wane -- initially Treasuries and, more recently, corporates. Needless to say, this draws the key premise of the current-account defense of the Bush Administration into serious question. To the extent that the capital account is turning, current-account financing difficulties can only intensify. The recent weakening of the US dollar in foreign exchange markets rounds out the picture. This should hardly be surprising -- currencies are the relative price that often picks up the bulk of the arbitrage between current- and capital-account disparities.
I remain convinced that America’s current-account deficit represents a key point of tension for the US and global economy. It is the crux of our"global decoupling" thesis -- that the world can no longer afford to be dependent on the American growth engine as the dominant source of economic growth. The coming US current-account adjustment speaks of a new recipe for sustained global growth -- a slower pace in the US, a speed-up elsewhere, and a weaker dollar. The logic of the Bush Administration is flawed in the sense that it relies on an ever-expanding stream of foreign inflows into dollar-denominated assets. In this post-bubble era, that may well turn out to be the ultimate in wishful thinking. Like Wall Street, someone always seems to be right in Washington -- it’s just a question of whom. This time, it may turn out to be the IMF.
<ul> ~ http://www.msdw.com</ul>
<center>
<HR>
</center>
Thread gesperrtgesamter Thread:
