• 2024-07-14
  • 54 comments

RMB to Be Pegged to Government Bonds

Central Bank just mentioned the phrase "to regularly enter the secondary market to buy and sell government bonds," and many people couldn't wait to jump to conclusions. They not only loudly proclaimed the arrival of a Chinese version of QE (Quantitative Easing), but also claimed that the yuan would be pegged to government bonds, heralding the arrival of a great monetary era.

Well, these people aren't afraid of being laughed at. If a currency is anchored to debt, can that currency have a healthy future? The more currency there is, the more debt there is, and in the end, the debt collapses and the currency becomes nothingness.

A debt-based currency has no way out; it's a path to nowhere.

Don't bring up the US dollar as an example. The reason the US dollar has become the global currency hegemon and once a great nation is because it initially pegged to gold and the unparalleled strong productivity of the United States.

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In 1944, at the Bretton Woods Conference, when the US dollar was established as the global currency hegemon, the dollar was fixedly linked to gold; 35 US dollars could be exchanged for 1 ounce of gold, and the dollar was known as "gold dollars."

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At the same time, the industrial output value of the United States accounted for 40% of the world's total. With US dollars, you could buy almost anything you wanted, such as Ford cars, Coca-Cola, Remington typewriters, Spam luncheon meat, Lee jeans, and so on.

Therefore, countries around the world accepted the US dollar as the global currency because they saw the dollar's value as extremely stable (fixedly linked to gold) and because the dollar could buy anything they wanted to purchase.Later on, in order to finance the war, the U.S. government continuously issued national debt and excessively printed money, which led to the decoupling of the U.S. dollar from gold (in 1971). This caused a collapse in credit and extreme confusion in currency values at the time, with many countries around the world selling off their U.S. dollars.

Europe also reflected on the pain and saw the significant drawbacks of the U.S. dollar. To avoid being affected by the fluctuations of the dollar in the future, they later established the European Economic Community and the Euro system.

Later on, the U.S. dollar pegged itself to oil, gaining pricing power over Middle Eastern oil-producing countries, which stabilized its value. Coupled with the outbreak of the U.S. IT and internet revolution, countries around the world were willing to continue accepting the U.S. dollar's global currency status because they could use dollars to buy Intel chips, Apple computers, and Microsoft operating systems to develop their own information technology industries.

After that, the U.S. continued to wage wars, excessively issued national debt, and excessively printed money, causing its debt to soar to a level that was destined to be unpayable.

At the same time, the number of things that could be bought with U.S. dollars decreased, and the stability and purchasing power of the dollar's value also decreased. The huge amount of U.S. dollar foreign exchange accumulated by countries around the world could only be used to buy U.S. debt and stocks, giving rise to the illusion that the dollar and U.S. debt were pegged.

The same is true for the United States itself. With the decline of the U.S. manufacturing industry and the lack of innovation in high-tech, the issuance of new U.S. dollars was mainly for borrowing money to live and stimulating the stock market, rather than for developing productivity. This also led to the fact that the U.S. dollar and U.S. debt have a certain pegging relationship today.

However, the pegging of the U.S. dollar and U.S. debt is a result of the decline of U.S. manufacturing and high-tech industries and the devaluation of the U.S. dollar, not the cause. Many people take the fact that the U.S. dollar and U.S. debt are partially pegged today and infer that the U.S. dollar was strong and became the global currency because it was pegged to U.S. debt. This is not only inconsistent with historical facts but also commits the logical error of reversing cause and effect.

Therefore, there is no need to advocate that pegging the Chinese yuan and national debt will create a great currency era and will open up the internationalization of the yuan. This is a wrong path.In order for the Chinese yuan to break free from the constraints of the US dollar and truly internationalize, it should be more closely linked to the commodity trade along the Belt and Road Initiative. It should be anchored to the overall level of national productivity and to China's current advantageous productive forces, such as green energy (electric vehicles, lithium batteries, solar panels) and carbon assets.