Asian currency wars; is China really the ‘currency manipulator’?

Ever since the Asian financial crisis in 1997, Asian economies have generally engaged in a policy of maintaining artificially cheap currencies in order to generate export-led growth. This led to substantial political pressure being placed on Asian countries, primarily from the US, to allow their currencies to appreciate.

The problem facing export dependent Asia is that this growth model has now broken. Firstly many of Asia’s currencies no longer appear that cheap (eg Indonesia is running its largest current account deficit since Q1 1997 and its reserves hit a two year low last month), and secondly, who is going to import all the exports given that the developed world is busy deleveraging?

These export dependent countries have been left fighting over a shrinking pie, or at least a non-growing pie. When countries are dependent on exporting tradeable goods, small changes in currency valuation can make a big difference to competitiveness. (As the UK has discovered, the flip side is that devaluation doesn’t make the blindest bit of difference when selling tradeable goods forms a very minor part of your economy.)

And that’s when you get currency wars. In the note I wrote in January (see why we love the US Dollar and worry about EM currencies), I mentioned that China’s devaluation in 1994 is widely cited as being one of the triggers for the 1997 Asian financial crisis. If you consider that Japan is currently more important to many Asian countries’ trade today than China was in 1993, could a big yen devaluation wreak havoc on the region in the same way?

The chart below shows the magnitude of Japan’s so far successful devaluation versus China, its biggest trade partner and global competitor. Some Asian currencies have weakened a little in sympathy, but more from investor expectations of action rather than from action itself. Chinese exports grew at a surprisingly strong 21.8% year on year in February, but it will be very interesting to see whether this can be sustained, whether other Asian countries can bounce from their current export slump, and if not, then what the region’s central banks and governments plan to do about it.