America’s Chinese disease

Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com:

...the Fed is engaged in massive “quantitative easing” — a misleading term, but I guess we’re stuck with it. What it basically means is that the Fed is selling Treasury bills or their equivalent (interest-paying excess bank reserves are essentially the same thing), while buying other assets, expanding its balance sheet enormously in the process.

What kinds of other assets? Mortgage-backed securities; securities backed by credit-card debt; longer-term government debt; etc..

One type of asset the Fed has not been buying is foreign short-term securities. But that’s not because such purchases would be ineffective. On the contrary, selling domestic short-term debt and buying its foreign-currency counterpart is the essence of a sterilized foreign-exchange-market intervention, which is a time-honored way of gaining a competitive advantage and helping your economy expand.

And some countries have, in fact, made foreign-currency purchases a part of their quantitative easing strategy — Switzerland in particular. The only reason the Fed isn’t doing this is that we’re a big player, and can’t be seen to be pursuing a beggar-thy-neighbor strategy.

But now ask the question: what would the effect be if China decided to sell a chunk of its Treasury bill holdings and put them in other currencies? The answer is that China would, in effect, be engaging in quantitative easing on behalf of the Fed. The Chinese would be doing us a favor! (And doing the Europeans and Japanese a lot of harm.)

Conversely, by continuing to buy dollars, the Chinese are in effect undermining part of the Fed’s efforts — they’re conducting quantitative diseasing, I guess you could say, hence the title of this post.

The point is that right now the United States has nothing to fear from Chinese threats to diversify out of the dollar. On the contrary, if the Chinese do decide to start selling dollars, Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke should send them a nice thank-you note.