Wednesday, October 14, 2020

Foreign Affairs: China Thinks America Is Losing Washington Must Show Beijing It’s Wrong

Tell me I am wrong: Foreign Affairs makes Xi's argument for him. The only case against him appears to by the "imprisonment" of the Muslim Uyghur population in Xinjiang, a charge none of the Muslim countries support, curiously, nor visitors there from other socialist, or non-aligned nations. America must win because of the Uyghurs? When the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and cops are shooting down unarmed Black men in the streets? And putting immigrant children in COVID cages? And spewing racist garbage daily from the President's COVID mouth?

China Thinks America Is Losing

Washington Must Show Beijing It's Wrong



The consequences of the presidency of Donald Trump will be debated for decades to come—but for the Chinese leadership, its meaning is already clear. China's rulers believe that the past four years have shown that the United States is rapidly declining and that this deterioration has caused Washington to frantically try to suppress China's rise. Trump's trade war, technology bans, and determination to blame China for his own mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic have all confirmed the perception of Chinese policy elites that the United States is bent on keeping their country down.

To be sure, the idea that the United States seeks to stymie and contain China was widespread among Chinese officials long before Trump came to power. What many Americans see as disruptive effects attributable only to Trump's presidency are, to China's current rulers, a profound vindication of their darkest earlier assessments of U.S. policy.

But Trump has turned what Beijing perceived as a long-term risk into an immediate crisis that demands the urgent mobilization of the Chinese system. The Trump administration has sought to weaken the grip of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on society, force the liberalization of the state-dominated Chinese economic system, and block China's drive to technological supremacy. Nearly four years into this gambit, however, Trump's policies appear to have produced the opposite result in each domain.

Washington needs a China strategy that not only assesses Chinese capabilities and aims but also takes full account of the way China's leaders understand the United States and have reacted to Trump's presidency. This strategy must also reject the faddish but inaccurate notion that China is somehow an impervious force, advancing on an immutable course and unresponsive to external pressure and incentives. The United States can craft a strategy that much more effectively deters China's most problematic behavior. But to do so, Washington must endeavor to upend Chinese leaders' assumption that the United States is inexorably declining. 

"THE WOLF IS COMING"

Chinese leaders and policymakers have believed for decades that U.S. power is waning and that the United States seeks to impede China's rise. Mao Zedong was fond of predicting the decline of the capitalist world led by the United States, comparing it to "a dying person who is sinking fast." He regularly attacked Western attempts to subvert China's communist revolution, denouncing "reactionaries trying to hold back the wheel of history." These ideas outlived Mao, although they were shaken as the CCP embraced market reforms and as the United States emerged as the sole superpower after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the 2008 financial crisis, which left China relatively unscathed, caused the country's leaders to wonder whether the ruinous decline of capitalism that Mao had predicted had in fact arrived. And with their Marxist-inflected view of historical forces, they expected that this prospect would lead, as night follows day, to the flailing of Mao's hopeless "reactionaries"—American leaders who would try in vain to hold China down. 

These ideas shaped the worldview of Chinese President Xi Jinping. When he came to power in 2012, he spoke of historical patterns of conflict between rising and fading hegemonic powers, warned about  the U.S. role in hastening the collapse of the Soviet Union, and promoted such figures as Wang Huning, a former law professor and longtime government adviser whose best-known book, America Against America, highlighted how far the United States fell short of its ideals. But Xi and his lieutenants were initially more focused on addressing the political and ideological fragility of the system they inherited; they expected the decay of the United States to be gradual.

Many Chinese elites now think that Trump's presidency has pushed that slow process into a new phase of sharp and irreversible deterioration. They took measure of the president's withdrawal from international agreements and institutions and his disdain for traditional alliances. They saw how U.S. domestic policies were exacerbating inequality and polarization, keeping out immigrants, and cutting federal funding for research and development. Wu Xinbo, the dean of Fudan University's Institute for International Studies, argued in 2018 that the "unwise policies" of the Trump administration were "accelerating and intensifying [U.S.] decline" and "have greatly weakened [the United States'] international status and influence." A commentary in the Beijing-backed newspaper Ta Kung Pao earlier this year held that "America is moving from 'declining' to 'declining faster.'" This belief has become a central premise of China's evolving strategy toward the United States.

Chinese leaders have believed for decades that the United States is a waning power.

CCP leaders connect this rapid American decline to intensified U.S. efforts to contain China; the United States under Trump has gone from being a latent, long-term menace to the source of concerted efforts to, in the favored phrase of Chinese officialdom, "comprehensively suppress" China. In 2018, Trump slapped tariffs on tens of billions of dollars' worth of Chinese goods and issued bans on the Chinese telecommunications firms Huawei and ZTE. (Although Trump eventually reversed his ZTE decision as a favor to Xi, the threat to the company—which relied on the United States for approximately one-quarter of the components in its equipment—was existential; analysts have described more recent measures against Huawei, similarly, as a "death sentence.") The rhetoric of past and present Trump advisers, such as Peter Navarro (whose books include The Coming China Wars and Death by China) and Steve Bannon (who called for "regime change in Beijing"), helps vindicate the darkest, most conspiratorial notions among the Chinese leadership.

Trump's actions and rhetoric have solidified Beijing's assessment that there is now a durable American effort underway to quickly suppress China, and Chinese leaders see that effort as bipartisan, too,  with near-unanimous congressional votes on legislation related to China and criticisms of China coming from prominent Democrats, such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. An editorial from this past July in the Chinese state-run newspaper Global Times stated, "China must accept the reality that America's attitude toward China has fundamentally changed." The shift in elite opinion in China is clear. According to Wei Jianguo, a former top Chinese trade official, the prevailing view in Beijing is that "the essence of the trade war is that the United States wants to destroy China." Fu Ying, a senior diplomat, declared in June that the United States' goal for China is now clearly "to slow it down through suppression," a fight that the declining superpower "can't afford to lose." The Foreign Ministry's spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, declared in August that the United States is "a far cry from the major power it used to be," with its leaders bent on "working to suppress China because they fear China's growth." These ideas are remarkably widespread in the statements of Chinese officials and experts, the pages of CCP magazines and newspapers, and across Chinese social media. 

Chinese leaders have long thought that this confrontation might arrive someday, but it has come much quicker than they expected. "People in the United States and China have for years said the wolf is coming, the wolf is coming, but the wolf hasn't come," Shi Yinhong, a leading international relations scholar, told The New York Times. "This time, the wolf is coming."

EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

With such perceptions entrenched, it should come as no surprise that China has reacted in ways that are leading to further conflict between the already divergent U.S. and Chinese systems. Since Xi's ascent, China's ever more authoritarian and domineering turn has alarmed governments around the world. In 2018, Xi removed term limits on his office. Under his watch, the CCP has more openly embraced its illiberal identity, pairing repression at home—most gruesomely in Xinjiang, where internment camps hold more than one million Uighurs and members of other minority ethnic groups—with loud criticism of democracies abroad. Despite U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's call to "engage and empower the Chinese people" against the CCP—an appeal widely interpreted in China as a bid for regime change—the party's hold over society remains strong. It rolled out new ideological and political campaigns this past summer. The clampdown that accompanied China's response to the COVID-19 pandemic has further bolstered Beijing's surveillance and social control systems.

Some top U.S. officials have maintained that the goal of Trump's policy is to force the liberalization of China's state-dominated economic system, but from the outset of the trade war in 2018, the Chinese government judged that Trump's goals were mercantilist—he cared only about getting a so-called good deal for the United States. In response, China's rulers have redoubled their reliance on the state sector to deal with the instability resulting from conflict with the United States. Since the early years of Xi's tenure, state-owned enterprises have benefited from increasingly favorable government policies and preferential bank lending, often at the expense of private firms. One economist with strong links to the CCP elite told me that he and many of his colleagues initially believed that Trump's trade war was a positive development because they thought it would reverse this trend and revive market reform. But the trade war has had the opposite effect: Xi has doubled down on building "stronger, better, and larger" state-owned enterprises and rejecting the deeper economic liberalization that officials around the world have long sought in China. 

In trade negotiations that reached a limited "Phase 1" agreement in January of this year, Beijing agreed to a series of pledges to buy U.S. goods, rather than to any significant new commitments to reform. Chinese state media reports even floated upgrading the state-dominated economic model to the status of one of China's "core interests"—a sacrosanct category usually reserved for territorial and sovereignty claims. Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored to many in China the advantages of this model, with the Xinhua News Agency announcing that state-owned enterprises "have been a vital force and the main force" in responding to the pandemic.

Chinese Vice Premier Liu He and Trump in Washington, D.C., January 2020
Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Far from curbing China's push for technological supremacy, Trump's actions have encouraged its leaders to accelerate their drive to reduce their country's dependence on the United States. For many years, China has tried to balance between reaping the benefits of interdependence and insulating itself from the risks of being the weaker partner in its relationship with the world's most powerful country. After Xi came to power, he made it a priority to address the dangers of interdependence, including through the "Made in China 2025" initiative, which aims to make China 70 percent self-sufficient in ten core technologies by the year 2025. Xi has proved willing to sacrifice economic growth in the name of national autonomy, and a range of cosmopolitan officials and government-linked experts who once supported greater integration have come to agree with him. Li Qingsi, the executive director of the Center for American Studies at Renmin University of China, wrote that the ZTE case in 2018 "disillusion[ed] those who advocate relying on the United States to develop our own economy" and drove home the lesson that "China must carry forward the tradition of self-reliance and reduce external dependence."

Beijing is finding it hard to speed up its self-sufficiency drive, but the direction is clear. A world in which China truly becomes self-reliant is a world in which the United States has much less leverage over China than it does at present. China is still dependent on foreign firms for many foundational technologies, including the cutting-edge semiconductors needed for everything from personal computers and smartphones to artificial intelligence systems. In 2019, Chinese leaders stopped talking publicly about Made in China 2025 to reduce tensions during negotiations with the United States, but the policy endures in substance, and one anonymous senior official told an American journalist that the CCP "will never give an inch" on the scheme's broader goals. Earlier this year, Xi pledged a further $1.4 trillion to invest in the development and deployment of advanced technological infrastructure such as 5G wireless networks, enhanced sensors and cameras, and automation.

Chinese concerns about dependency on the United States also extend more widely. Tensions have recently become especially high around U.S. dominance of international finance, from the use of the dollar to interbank payment systems. Even internationalist officials, such as the former finance minister Lou Jiwei, have started warning about the risk of a "financial war" and about the United States doing "everything in its power to use bullying measures [and] long-arm jurisdiction" against China. 

Leaders in Beijing believe that a declining United States will seek to suppress China's rise.

Chinese elites describe the COVID-19 pandemic as proof that the United States will lash out at China as it plunges into decline. Trump's failure to control the disease, with around six million cases and nearly 200,000 deaths in the United States by the end of August, reflects what Chinese commentators see as the parlous state of the country. They have called the pandemic "Waterloo for America's leadership" and "the end of the American century." They believe that Trump launched his election-season push against China—he has called COVID-19 "the plague from China" and issued new sanctions and other measures targeting Chinese entities—to distract from the failings of his administration. But many leading Chinese voices are convinced that whatever the result of the U.S. presidential election, the trajectory of U.S.-Chinese relations is now set by the inexorable forces of American decline and hostility to China. "Even if Biden wins," Yuan Peng, the influential president of the Ministry of State Security's China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, recently wrote, ". . . America will have a hard time reassuming its role as a world leader . . . and America's China policy will only get increasingly hyper-sensitive, unyielding, and arrogant as they double down on containment and suppression."

Xi is rolling out new policies that are based on these expectations. Beginning this past spring, he unveiled an agenda for the economy that aims to reorient China's economic development inward, relying much more on China's enormous domestic market and less on the "more unstable and uncertain world." Fostering domestic demand has long been a talking point of Chinese leaders, but Xi has pledged to make achieving greater domestic consumption a centerpiece of the upcoming five-year plan for 2021–25. This shift is clearly driven by the assumption that the United States will continue working against China. As one state media outlet declared pointedly in late July, "No country and no individual can stop the historic pace of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation."

To be sure, Xi would like to de-escalate the trade and technology conflicts with the United States to buy time. He also wants China to strengthen and diversify its ties to other economies around the world, including through the Belt and Road Initiative, an international network of infrastructure projects that aims to increase China's geopolitical influence. China is not deglobalizing as much as it is de-Americanizing. 

China's conviction that the United States is a diminishing and hostile power has emboldened its leaders to pursue long-standing objectives with new vigor. Their view of U.S. decline makes them see fewer risks in taking highly aggressive positions, and their sense of U.S. hostility, among other factors, increases their willingness to incur international opprobrium: imposing a new national security law on Hong Kong; committing atrocities in Xinjiang; bullying Australia, India, and the Philippines; threatening Taiwan; forging new partnerships with Iran and Russia; and letting Chinese diplomats spread conspiracy theories about the origins of COVID-19. With the United States withdrawing from multilateralism and international institutions, China has tried to reshape global bodies, such as the UN Human Rights Council, in its favor. China's behavior in these areas is often at odds with U.S. interests and a rules-based order, with Beijing flouting rules it dislikes and undermining liberal norms and values.

A BETTER CHINA STRATEGY

How should U.S. strategy toward China grapple with these changes? Given the dismal track record of the past several years, some may be tempted to try to undo these shifts by reassuring Beijing that the United States does not in fact intend to keep China down. This path is highly unlikely to succeed. China's ambitions conflict with U.S. interests in many areas—and with Trump confirming so much of Beijing's view of the United States, no amount of diplomatic reassurance can convince China's leaders to give up their quest for security through strengthening their control over society, shoring up the statist economic system, and reducing China's dependence on the United States. Attempting to persuade them otherwise at this point would seem only to be cheap talk, at odds with their perception of "the wheel of history" turning faster toward American decline. U.S. strategy must seek to move forward, not backward, from the current predicament.

But that does not mean Beijing's entire agenda is immutable. This view is much in vogue today, casting China not as a country that responds to pressure and incentives but as an adamantine force incapable of reacting to external stimuli. Yet it would be wrong to conclude that the unsuccessful policies of the past several years mean that the United States is somehow helpless in the face of a more powerful China, only able to pull up the drawbridge, prepare for conflict, and hope that the CCP collapses. A different approach—neither a nostalgic "reset" nor that fearful and fatalistic vision—is needed.

The best path forward is to craft a strategy premised on a more realistic assessment of both U.S. and Chinese interests. Beijing sees the world in harshly competitive and ideological terms, but Washington can still advance its interests with respect to China. The most ambitious—and most important—aspect of this strategy must be showing China and the rest of the world that the United States remains strong and can reliably revive the sources of its power and leadership. China's rulers have built their strategy on a profound underestimation of the United States. By upending the exaggerated reports of its demise, the United States could change China's calculus and find a way toward sustainable coexistence on favorable terms.

Nothing is as important to competing effectively with China as what the United States does at home, revitalizing its economic fundamentals, technological edge, and democratic system. All these initiatives would be important even in the absence of competition with China, but the rivalry with Beijing adds to their urgency. Policymakers must get the COVID-19 crisis under control, implement economic policies that benefit all Americans, welcome immigrants who enrich U.S. society, pursue racial justice to show the world that U.S. democracy can remain a beacon of freedom and equality, make smart investments in U.S. defense capabilities, and scale up federal funding for research and development. This ambitious agenda for national renewal and resilience would profoundly shake the foundations of the CCP's strategy. U.S. leaders should also not shy away from publicly pointing out authoritarian China's many weaknesses, including the country's aging population, ecological crises, numerous border disputes, and declining international popularity.

Anti-government demonstrators in Hong Kong, December 2019
Anti-government demonstrators in Hong Kong, December 2019 
Navesh Chitrakar / Reuters

The United States must also band together with allies and partners in Asia and Europe to push back against problematic Chinese behavior. That effort should include using joint economic leverage to punish firms and groups that steal intellectual property and engage in other unfair and illegal conduct; strengthening military capabilities and showing increased resolve in the face of Chinese aggression; and sanctioning institutions and officials that are aiding repression in Hong Kong, Tibet, and Xinjiang. They should also work to revitalize the international institutions and those elements of the rules-based order that can limit the competition between states. Playing defense, the United States and its partners need to take steps to maintain their leverage in key areas of international trade while disentangling themselves entirely from supply chains that create unacceptable vulnerabilities to China (such as the production of critical medical supplies) and diversifying away from those for which the danger is less serious. Not all risks are equally significant, however, and the United States and its democratic allies are open societies that still stand to gain from economic, scientific, and people-to-people exchanges with countries around the world, including China, even as they do more to guard against coercion and espionage from foreign rivals.

The United States and China also have important shared interests and should strive to prevent the worst outcomes of their competition. Both countries must confront profound challenges such as climate change, pandemic disease, and nuclear proliferation, which cannot be met without coordination and joint action. U.S. and Chinese leaders should also work to head off foreseeable disasters, such as the looming risk of cyberwar and the prospect of a conflict in the contested South China Sea. In these most volatile and dangerous areas, they should negotiate redlines and effective mechanisms for crisis management and de-escalation. By working with China on these issues when necessary, even in the context of an intensely competitive relationship, the United States would show Beijing that it does not fear or seek to contain a prosperous China that takes on a major global role and plays by the rules. Over time, such steps could also eventually create space for China's leaders to decide that addressing these urgent shared problems is more important than believing their own paranoid visions of the United States.

But all these efforts will pay off fully only if the United States can demonstrate how mistaken the CCP is about the notion of inexorable U.S. decline. Achieving clarity about the task ahead would itself be a reason for optimism. The Chinese leadership's dark view of the prospects for the United States is wrong. The United States is not trapped by old ways of addressing problems or borne along by historical forces beyond its power to shape. Much of what the United States must do to compete effectively with China is within its control—and there is still time to act.

--

Tuesday, October 13, 2020

Piketty: What to do with Covid debt? [feedly]

What to do with Covid debt?
https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/piketty/2020/10/13/what-to-do-with-covid-debt/

Thomas Piketty

How are States going to deal with the accumulation of public debt generated by the Covid crisis? For many, the answer is clear: central banks will take on their balance sheets a growing share of the debts, and everything will be settled. In reality, things are more complex. Money is part of the solution but will not be enough. Sooner or later, the wealthiest will have to be called upon.

Let's recap. In 2020, money creation has taken on unprecedented proportions. The Federal Reserve's balance sheet jumped from $4159 billion as of February 24 to $7056 billion as of  September 28, or nearly $3 trillion in monetary injection in 7 months, which has never been seen before. The balance sheet of the Eurosystem (the network of central banks piloted by the ECB) rose from 4692 billion euros on 28 February to 6705 billion on 2 October, an increase of 2000 billion. In relation to the GDP of the euro zone, the Eurosystem's balance sheet, which had already risen from 10% to 40% of GDP between 2008 and 2018, has just jumped to almost 60% between February and October 2020.

What is all this money used for? In calm weather, central banks are content to make short-term loans to ensure the liquidity of the system. As the inflow and outflow of money in and out of the various private banks never balance exactly to the day, the central banks lend for a few days, amounts which the institutions then repay.

Following the 2008 crisis, central banks started lending money at increasingly longer maturities (a few weeks, then a few months, or even several years) in order to reassure financial players, who were petrified at the idea that their gambling partners would go bankrupt. And there was a lot to be done, because, for lack of adequate regulation, financial gambling has become a gigantic planetary casino over the last few decades. Everyone has started lending and borrowing in unprecedented proportions, with the result that the total private financial assets and liabilities held by banks, companies and households now exceed 1000% of GDP in rich countries (without even including derivative securities), compared to 200% in the 1970s. Real wealth (i.e. the net worth of real estate and businesses) has also increased from 300% to 500% of GDP, but much less strongly, illustrating the financialisation of the economy.  In a way, the balance sheets of central banks have only followed (slightly later) the explosion of private balance sheets, in order to preserve their capacity to act in the face of the markets.

The new activism of the central banks has also allowed them to buy back a growing share of public debt securities, while bringing interest rates down to zero. The ECB already held 20% of the public debt of the euro zone at the beginning of 2020, and could hold nearly 30% by the end of the year. A similar development is taking place in the United States.

As it is unlikely that the ECB or the Fed will ever decide to put these securities back on the markets or to demand their repayment, the decision to no longer count them in the total public debt could be taken now. If registration of this guarantee in legal form is desired, which would be preferable, then this might take a little more time and debate.

The most important question is the following: should we continue along this path, and can we envisage that central banks will in future hold 50% and then 100% of public debts, thereby lightening the financial burden on States? From a technical point of view, this would not pose any problem. The difficulty is that by resolving the question of public debt on one hand, this policy creates other difficulties elsewhere, particularly in terms of increasing inequalities of wealth. The orgy of money creation and the purchase of financial securities in fact leads to an increase in stock and property prices, which contributes to the enrichment of the richest. For small savers, zero or negative interest rates are not necessarily good news. But for those who can afford to borrow at low rates and who have the financial, legal and tax expertise to find the right investments, excellent returns are possible. According to Challenges, France's 500 largest fortunes have thus risen from €210 to €730 billion between 2010 and 2020 (from 10% to 30% of GDP). Such a development is socially and politically unsustainable.

It would be different if monetary creation, instead of fuelling the financial bubble, were mobilised to finance a real social and ecological recovery, i.e. by assuming strong job creation and wage increases in hospitals, schools, thermal efficiency and local services. This would alleviate debt while reducing inequalities, investing in sectors useful for the future and shifting inflation from asset prices to wages and goods and services.

However, this would not be a miracle solution either. As soon as inflation becomes substantial again (say 3%-4% per year), we would have to put a stop to money creation and use fiscal means. The whole history of public debt shows this: money alone cannot offer a peaceful solution to a problem of this magnitude, because it leads in one way or another to uncontrolled distributive consequences. It was by resorting to exceptional levies on the better-off that the large public debts of the post-war period were extinguished and that the social and productive pact of the following decades was rebuilt. Let's bet that the same will be true in the future.

 

Notes on the sources:

On central bank balance sheets, see also this tribune and Capital and ideology (chapter 13)

Balance sheet ECB : 4692 billions € on 28/2/2020, 6705 billions € on 2/10/2020

(39% GDP, 56% GDP)

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/wfs/2020/html/ecb.fst200303.en.html

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/wfs/2020/html/ecb.fst201007.en.html

This is due both to the new asset purchasing programme (PEPP, Pandemic emergency purchase programme) and to the increased used of old ones (in particular PSPP, Public sector purchase programme). See here the decomposition by country (alway with ECB capital keys as target, anchored upon national GDPs): https://www.ecb.europa.eu/mopo/implement/omt/html/index.en.html

GDP 2019 Eurozone (12 000 billions euros) EU 27 (14 000 billions euros) (market prices): https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/tec00001/default/table

Balance sheet Fed : 4159 billions $ on 24/2/2020, 7056 billions $ on 28/9/2020

(19% GDP, 33,0% GDP)

https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttrends.htm

BEA US GDP : 21 400 billions $ 2019


 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Tim Taylor: A Nobel Prize for Auction Theory: Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson [feedly]

A Nobel Prize for Auction Theory: Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson
https://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2020/10/a-nobel-prize-for-auction-theory-paul.html

Auctions are widely used throughout the economy. The big auction houses like Christie's and Sotheby's are well-known for selling famous art, and many people have either attended a live auction at a fund-raising event or a flea market or participated in an online auction at a site like eBay. But the behind-the-scenes uses of auctions are far more important. The right for online advertising to appear on your screen is sold in an auction format. When the US government borrows money by selling Treasury debt, it does so in an auction format. When electricity providers sign contracts to purchase electricity from electricity producers, they often use an auction format to do so. Some of the proposals for a buying and selling permits to emit carbon, as a mechanism for the gradual reduction of carbon emissions, would auction off the right to emit carbon. 

One useful property of auctions is that in a number of settings they can discipline the public sector to make decisions based on economic values, rather than favoritism. For example, when a city wants to sign a contract with a company that will pick up the garbage from households, companies can submit bids--rather than having a city council choose the company run by someone's favorite uncle. When the US government wants to give companies the right to drill in certain areas for offshore oil, or wishes to allocate radio spectrum for use by phone companies, it can auction off the rights rather than handing them out to whatever company has the best behind-the-scenes lobbyists.  In many countries, auctions are used to privatize selling off a formerly government-owned company.

But the bad thing about auctions is that (like all market mechanisms), they can go sideways and produce undesirable results in certain settings. The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2020--commonly known as the Nobel Prize in economics, was awarded to Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson "for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats." For some years now, the Nobel committee has also published a couple of useful reports with each award, one aimed a a popular audience and one with more econo-speak, jargon, and technical detail. I'll quote here from both reports: "Popular science background: The quest for the perfect auction" and "Scientific Background: Improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats." 

A useful starting point is to recognize that auctions can have a wide array of formats. Most people are used to the idea of an auction where an auctioneer presides over a room of people who call out bids, until no one is willing to call out a higher bid. But auctions don't need to work in that way. 

An "English auction" is one where the bids are ascending, until a highest bid is reached. A "Dutch auction"--which is commonly used to sell about 20 million fresh flowers per day--starts with a high bid and then declines, so that the first person to speak up wins. In an open-outcry auction, the bid are heard by everyone, but in a sealed-bid auction, the bids are private. Some auctions have only one round of bidding; others may eliminate some bidders after one round but proceed through multiple rounds. In "first-price" auctions, the winner pays what they bid; in "second-price" auctions, the winner instead pays whatever was bi by the runner up. 

In some auctions the value of what is being bid on is mostly a "private value" to the bidders (the Nobel committee suggests thinking about bidding on dinner with a Nobel economist as an example, but you may prefer to substitute a celebrity of your choice), but in other cases, like bidding on an offshore oil lease, the value of the object is at least to some extent a "common value," because any oil that is found will be sold at the global market price. In some auctions, the bidders may have detailed private information about what is being sold (say, in the case where a house is being sold but you are allowed to do your own inspection before bidding), while in other auctions the information about the object being auctioned may be mostly public. 

In short, there is no single perfect auction. Instead, thinking about how auctions work means considering for any specific context how auction rules and format in that situation, given what determines the value of the auctioned objects and what what kind of information and uncertainty bidders might have. 

If the auction rules aren't set up appropriately, the results can go sideways. For some example, Paul Klemperer wrote a some years back on the subject of "What Really Matters in Auction Design." 
One of his examples was about what happened in 1991, when the UK used a process of sealed-bid auctions to see what company would be allowed to provide television services in certain areas. Klemperer writes: 
The 1991 U.K. sale of television franchises by a sealed-bid auction is a dramatic example While the regions in the South and Southeast, Southwest, East, Wales and West, Northeast and Yorkshire all sold in the range of 9.36 to 15.88 pounds per head of population, the only—and therefore winning—bid for the Midlands region was made by the incumbent firm and was just one-twentieth of one penny (!) per head of population. Much the same happened in Scotland, where the only bidder for the Central region generously bid one-seventh of one penny per capita. What had happened was that bidders were required to provide very detailed region-specific programming plans. In each of these two regions, the only bidder figured out that no one else had developed such a plan.
Another problem arises if the bidders find a way to signal each other to hold prices down. In some cases, the bidders can use the bidding process itself to send messages. Here's an example from Klemperer: 
In a multilicense U.S. spectrum auction in 1996–1997, U.S. West was competing vigorously with McLeod for lot number 378: a license in Rochester, Minnesota. Although most bids in the auction had been in exact thousands of dollars, U.S. West bid $313,378 and $62,378 for two licenses in Iowa in which it had earlier shown no interest, overbidding McLeod, who had seemed to be the uncontested high bidder for these licenses. McLeod got the point that it was being punished for competing in Rochester and dropped out of that market. Since McLeod made subsequent higher bids on the Iowa licenses, the "punishment" bids cost U.S. West nothing (Cramton and Schwartz, 1999).
Notice that the bids from U.S. West ended in the number 378, which was the lot number where the company wanted McLeod to back off. 

Of course, concerns like these have obvious answers. For example, set a "reserve price" or a minimum price that needs to be bid for the object, so no one gets it for (nearly) free. Also, set a rule that all bids need to be in certain fixed amounts, and that increases in bids also need to be in fixed amounts. But making these points both raises practical questions of how this should be done, and also shows some ways in which the practical rules of auctions can matter a lot. 

A more subtle but well-known problem with auctions is called the "winner's curse." It was first documented in the context of bidding by companies for off-shore oil leases. An analysis of the bids, along with how much oil was later discovered in the area, found that the "winner" of these auctions was on average losing money. The reason is that each individual company was forming its own guess about how much oil was on the site. Naturally, some companies would be more optimistic than others, and the most over-optimistic company of all was likely to bid highest and "win" the auction. A problem is that once bidders in an auction become aware of the risk of the winner's curse, they may become very reluctant to bid, so that the bids stop representing the actual estimates of value. 

In professional sports, this kind of scenario often plays out when free agents try to encourage bidding among teams for their services. From the player point of view, it only takes one high-end bidder, a bidder who perhaps is ignoring the winner's curse, to get a great contract. But many teams may decide to avoid the risk of overpaying and the winner's curse by not bidding at all. 

There are various possible responses to a winner's curse in an auction format. One is to find ways for the bidders to collect more private information, so that they can be more confident in their bidding. Another is a "second-price" auction, where the winner pays the price of the second-highest bidder. This format provides some protection against the winner's curse: that is, everyone can feel free to bid as high as they would like, knowing that if they are way out of line with the second-price bid, they will only have to pay the second-price bid. If a second-price bid greatly reduces concerns about the winner's curse and leads to more aggressive bidding, it can (counterintuitively) end up raising more money than a first-price auction. 

The auctions that most people participate in are "private-value auctions," where the issue is just how much do you want it--because you are planning to use it rather than to resell it. In this setting, a live auctioneer tries to get people emotionally involved in how much they want something, and in this sense to get them to pay more than they had perhaps planned to pay beforehand. As Ambrose Bierce wrote in his Devil's Dictionary published back in 1906: "AUCTIONEER, n. The man who proclaims with a hammer that he has picked a pocket with his tongue."

But auctions for oil leases, spectrum rights, privatized companies, Treasury debt, an so on have some element of being "common value" auctions, where the value of what is being sold will be similar across  potential buyers. As the Nobel committee writes: "Robert Wilson was the first to create a framework for the analysis of auctions with common values, and to describe how bidders behave in such circumstances. In three classic papers from the 1960s and 1970s, he described the optimal bidding strategy for a first-price auction when the true value is uncertain. Participants will bid lower than their best estimate of the value, to avoid making a bad deal and thus be afflicted by the winner's curse. His analysis also shows that with greater uncertainty, bidders will be more cautious and the final price will be lower. Finally, Wilson shows that the  problems caused by the winner's curse are even greater when some bidders have better information than others. Those who are at an information disadvantage will then bid even lower or completely abstain from participating in the auction."

But when you think about it, many of these "common value" auctions actually have a mixture of private values as well. For example, consider bidding on an offshore oil lease. The value of any oil discovered may be a common value. But each individual company may have specific technology for discovering or extracting oil that works better in some situations that others. Some companies may also already be operating nearby, or have facilities nearby. In short, lots of real-world auctions are a mixture of private and common values. As the Nobel committee writes: 
In most auctions, the bidders have both private and common values. Suppose you are thinking about bidding in an auction for an apartment or a house; your willingness to pay then depends on your private value (how much you appreciate its condition, floor plan and location) and your estimate of the common value (how much you might be able to sell it for in the future). An energy company that bids on the right to extract natural gas is concerned with both the size of the gas reservoir (a common value) and the cost of extracting the gas (a private value, as the cost depends on the technology available to the company). A bank that bids for government bonds considers the future market interest rate (a common value) and the number of their customers who want to buy bonds (a private value). ... The person who finally cracked this nut was Paul Milgrom, in a handful of papers published around 1980. ... This particular result reflects a general principle: an auction format provides higher revenue the stronger the link between the bids and the bidders' private information. Therefore, the seller has an interest in providing participants with as much information as possible about the object's value before the bidding starts. For example, the seller of a house can expect a higher final price if the bidders have access to an (independent) expert valuation before bidding starts.
In addition, Milgrom has participated in setting up new kinds of auctions. When auctioning radio spectrum to telecommunications providers, for example, how much you are willing to bid for rights in one geographic area may be linked whether you own the rights in an adjoining area. Thus, rather than auctioning off each geographic area separately--which can lead problems of collusion between bidders-- it makes sense to design a Simultaneous Multiple Round Auction, which starts with low prices and allows repeated bids across many areas, so that geographic patterns of ownership can evolve in a single process. There is also a Combinatorial Clock Auction, in which bidders might choose to bid on overall "packages" of frequencies, rather than bidding separately on each license. Milgrom also was a leading developer of the Incentive Auction, which the Nobel committee describes in this way;
The resulting new Incentive auction was adopted by the FCC in 2017. This design combines two separate but interdependent auctions. The first is a reverse auction that determines a price at which the remaining over-the-air broadcasters voluntarily relinquish their existing spectrum-usage rights. The second is a forward auction of the freed-up spectrum. In 2017, the reverse auction removed 14 channels from broadcast use, at a cost of $10.1 billion. The forward auction sold 70 MHz of wireless internet licenses for $19.8 billion, and created 14 MHz of surplus spectrum. The two stages of the incentive auction thus generated just below $10 billion to U.S. taxpayers, freed up considerable spectrum for future use, and presumably raised the expected surpluses of sellers as well as buyers.
The economic theory of auctions is clearly tied up in intimate ways with the practice and design of real-world auctions. More broadly, close analysis of buyers and sellers in the structured environment of auctions can also offer broader insights into how non-auction markets work as well. After all, in some ways a competitive market is just an informal auction with sellers offering bids hoping to get a higher price and buyers making offers hoping to get a lower price. 

For more from Milgrom and Wilson on auctions and related economics, here are some articles from the Journal of Economic Perspectives, where I work as Managing Editor. 

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China Bolsters Its Dominance of Global Trade [feedly]

China Bolsters Its Dominance of Global Trade
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-13/china-bolsters-global-trade-dominance-by-surviving-virus-trump

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China is cementing its status as the world's dominant trading nation, confounding warnings that a once in a century pandemic combined with simmering tensions with the U.S. would derail that status.

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Surging global demand for everything from hazmat suits to work-from-home technology has allowed China, which contained the virus months ago, to capture record market share of global exports by quickly reopening its factories while the rest of the world grappled with lockdowns. It's a striking reversal from the first two months of the year when China's exports contracted by 17.1%.

It's also an outcome that underscores the nation's enduring role in manufacturing even amid simmering tensions with the U.S. that have fueled talk of shifting supply chains. For all the tariffs levied by the Trump administration, monthly sales to the U.S. remain robust.

Anti-Covid Demand

China's exports of personal protective equipment, WFH devices jumped

Source: General Administration of Customs, Bloomberg

"China's export performance during this crisis is indeed a proof of its solid status as the world's factory," said Yao Wei, China economist at Societe Generale SA. "It is reliable, as the quick and effective containment of the outbreak in China allowed its manufacturing sector to resume operations way ahead of others."

The bumper performance was reflected in government data for September which showed exports rose for the fourth straight month while imports surged. Li Kuiwen, a spokesperson for the General Administration of Customs, told reporters that China's overall share of world trade hit a record in the seven months to July, citing demand that included health-care equipment and technology.

What Bloomberg's Economists Say

"Looking ahead, we expect exports to continue to pick up on a year-on-year basis in the months ahead. But we think headwinds may strengthen, due to renewed outbreaks of Covid-19 in Europe and potential risks to trade related to the deterioration in U.S.-China relations. We expect imports to continue to register year-on-year growth, though the pace may slow."

Click here to read the full report.

-- David Qu, China economist

The question is whether this is as good as it gets given the resurgent virus in Europe and elsewhere that threatens another cycle of stop-start economic activity that will complicate the global recovery. China has also lost some of its early advantage as production recovered in rival trading partners as lockdowns were eased.

"China's export growth will fade eventually when world production catches up," Chi Lo, Greater China economist at BNP Paribas Asset Management told Bloomberg Television.

There are other complications too. The better economic performance has bolstered the yuan, which hit an 18-month high last week before the government took measures to cool it. China's current account is now firmly back in surplus after a brief flirtation with deficit, a long-standing imbalance often criticized for its global ramifications.

Rising Share

China's export share in global trade gained amid pandemic

Source: Bloomberg Economics

For now, the picture is upbeat. Exports grew 9.9% in dollar terms in September from a year earlier, while imports rose 13.2%, the customs administration said Tuesday. That left a trade surplus of $37 billion for the month. Economists had forecast that exports would increase by 10% while imports would edge up 0.4%.

"Renewed virus outbreaks in trading partners will be a challenge, but shipments of products benefiting from virus-related demand should continue to hold up," said Louis Kuijs, an economist at Oxford Economics.

The China figures gel with an improving global outlook, for now. The World Trade Organization expects global merchandise trade to fall by 9.2% this year from 2019, compared with the 12.9% drop projected in April. All 10 gauges on the Bloomberg Trade Tracker fit in their "normal" ranges, starting in early September.

Export performance continued upward trend

The pick-up in China's imports also suggests a steady domestic recovery is gaining traction, a view that was further bolstered by data released Tuesday showing demand for cars continues to go from strength to strength with deliveries of sedans, SUVs, minivans and multipurpose vehicles jumping 7.4% in September from a year earlier.

Geopolitical tensions were probably one reason for the imports bump as technology firms stockpiled key components ahead of the imposition of sanctions on telecommunications firm Huawei Technologies Co. Purchases from Taiwan jumped 35.8%, while imports from Japan and South Korea rose 13.4% and 17.2% respectively.

That vulnerability is spurring China's government to push for self reliance in critical areas of the economy. In a sweep through China's southern manufacturing powerhouse of Guangdong, President Xi Jinping urged a greater focus on quality to overcome increased global uncertainty and doubled down on a message of "self-reliance".

"Currently, we are experiencing changes unseen in a century, and we need to set ourselves on a path to higher quality self-reliance," Xi told workers at a Shenzhen factory that makes advanced ceramics for most major Chinese mobile phone makers.

Xi is slated to outline his latest policies Wednesday in a speech in Shenzhen to mark to 40th anniversary of the city's establishment as a special economic zone.

— With assistance by Enda Curran, Lin Zhu, and Miao Han


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Monday, October 12, 2020

The Washington Post Has Never Heard of the International Monetary Fund [feedly]

The Washington Post Has Never Heard of the International Monetary Fund
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/beat_the_press/~3/GbI5kjDipKE/

That would seem to be the case from reading the paper's editorial on the need to take steps to reduce extreme poverty in developing countries. The editorial never once mentions the proposal before the International Monetary Fund to substantially increase the special drawing rights available to developing countries.

This measure, which has the support of the I.M.F. leadership, and most of its member states (but not the Trump administration), would give the developing countries resources to help their economies recover from the pandemic. It is surprising that the Post would not mention it in an editorial on reducing world poverty.

It is also worth noting that the Trump  method of pursuing a vaccine, with grants of patent monopolies, rather than an open collaborative effort, is likely to make it more difficult for developing countries to get access to a vaccine. While this route does contribute to the upward distribution of income, it is not an efficient way to develop a vaccine. It does appear as though China is at least partially filling the gap created by the Trump administration going this route. 

The post The Washington Post Has Never Heard of the International Monetary Fund appeared first on Center for Economic and Policy Research.


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