According to the data provided by the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, by the end of the second quarter of 2006, China's foreign exchange reserves had reached 89 1 1000 billion US dollars, and China's foreign exchange reserves had surpassed Japan, which has been the world's largest country for a long time, becoming the new "overlord" of global reserves, which added fuel to the fire and heated up the discussion again. As the world's number one, we have reason to be happy, but if we make a historical survey of China's foreign creditor's rights and foreign debts, today's achievements are not worth being too excited about. The important role of foreign exchange reserves is to maintain a country's external solvency, including the ability to liquidate imports, repay foreign debts, pay foreign profits, and the most important thing is the ability to repay foreign debts. International economists often compare and analyze a country's foreign exchange reserves with a country's foreign debt. Foreign exchange reserves minus foreign debts are a country's net foreign creditor's rights, and only positive net creditor's rights are a country's real wealth. Therefore, the analysis of foreign exchange reserves must be combined with foreign debt, and it is of little economic significance to analyze foreign exchange reserves in isolation.
China's Historical View of Foreign Exchange Reserves
The documented data of China's foreign exchange reserves can be traced back to 1950. Comparing the historical data of China's foreign exchange reserves, it is actually somewhat sad. Throughout the 1950s, the best-performing foreign exchange reserve of 1955 was only 10.8 billion US dollars, and the average annual foreign exchange reserve of 1 0 was only10 billion US dollars. Throughout the 1960s, the best-performing foreign exchange reserves of 1969 did not reach $500 million, and the average annual foreign exchange reserves of 10 were less than $200 million. Therefore, the foreign exchange reserves in the first 30 years after the founding of the People's Republic of China were basically negligible, and the government lived a tight life. The 1980s got off to a bad start, with an average annual 10 foreign exchange reserve of only $4.5 billion, which was out of proportion to the rapid economic growth in China at that time. The real "take-off" of China's foreign exchange reserves began at 1994, which reached $50 billion in that year, and thus set off a long wave of foreign exchange reserve growth.196 broke through 100 billion, and in 2006 it broke through $200 billion in 5438+0, followed by 2003 and 2000. Some people like to calculate the growth rate of China's foreign exchange reserves, how many times it has increased in the past 50 years and how many times it has increased in the past 40 years. In fact, it has no substantive economic significance. The reason is that the base number is too small to be comparable. By comparing China's foreign debt data, it is found that it was not until 1999 that China's foreign exchange reserves exceeded its foreign debt and broke away from the warning line of foreign exchange risk indicators.
Comparative Analysis of China's Foreign Exchange Reserve and Foreign Debt
A country's foreign economic balance is not only reflected in foreign exchange reserves, which is only one end of a country's foreign economic balance equation, and the other end is foreign debt. Foreign analysts pay attention to the stock balance of a country's foreign economy, and must pay attention to the interaction between foreign exchange reserves and foreign debts to measure a country's foreign debt burden, foreign debt risk and foreign debt solvency. To a great extent, foreign exchange reserves also limit a country's ability to borrow. In the index system to measure a country's foreign debt risk and solvency, the interaction between foreign exchange reserves and foreign debt mainly involves two indicators: one is the ratio of foreign exchange reserves/foreign debt balance, and the other is the ratio of short-term foreign debt/foreign exchange reserves. The foreign exchange reserve/foreign debt balance ratio measures the ratio of a country's foreign debt stock to its foreign debt stock, and examines a country's overall debt risk and debt solvency. According to internationally recognized standards, this ratio should be controlled above 100%. More than 65,438+000% is safe and 80% is a warning line. If it is less than 40%, it means that a country's foreign debt has entered a state of emergency. The ratio of short-term foreign debt to foreign exchange reserves measures the solvency of foreign exchange reserves to debts due in the current period. The internationally recognized standard is that 35% is the safety line and 45% is the warning line. If it is greater than 55%, it means that a country's foreign debt risk has entered a state of emergency. Before 1985, the government implemented the basic idea of "no domestic debt, no foreign debt", which was also affected by the ability to borrow from abroad. China's foreign debt balance has been small, but it has not avoided debt shortage. To 1985, the absolute scale is not large, only1500 million dollars. After 1985, foreign trade has been in deficit due to the huge gap of funds for national economic construction, the scale of foreign capital inflow is very small, and the demand for foreign debt has expanded rapidly. Before 1994, the growth of China's foreign debt was mainly used to make up for the domestic capital gap, balance the trade deficit and the balance of payments, and even to maintain the solvency. In recent years, the reasons for the growth of foreign debt have changed obviously, mainly from three aspects: first, due to the growth of China's international trade, trade-related foreign debt such as trade credit and deferred payment has increased sharply, accounting for about 50% of the total foreign debt; Second, due to the opening of China's financial market, a large number of foreign-funded financial institutions have entered, and the debts of foreign-funded financial institutions as debt subjects have grown rapidly, accounting for almost one-fifth of the total debts; Third, due to the improvement of China's international reputation and solvency, the ability to lend to international financial institutions such as the World Bank has improved, and the World Bank's loans to China's aid projects have increased substantially. Generally speaking, from 1985 to 2005, China's foreign debt experienced a continuous rising process. 1985, the foreign debt balance was only15.8 billion dollars, 1990 exceeded 50 billion dollars, 1995 exceeded10 billion dollars.
Different from the change track of foreign debt balance index, the ratio of foreign debt balance to foreign exchange reserves in China rose strongly at first, and then decreased rapidly from 1985, but it was driven outside the safety line for a long time. 1985, the balance of foreign debt is six times that of foreign exchange reserves. According to this index, China's foreign debt has entered a state of emergency. However, the increase in the ratio of foreign debt balance to foreign exchange reserves has not stopped there. 1988 rose to 12 times of foreign exchange reserves, which was a "super emergency" and was actually on the verge of collapse. This is the fundamental reason for the continuous tightening of China's foreign exchange management in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Since then, China's foreign debt and foreign exchange management has been fruitful, and the proportion of foreign debt balance in foreign exchange reserves has been declining. The stability of China's foreign debt balance/foreign exchange reserve index improved after 1994, mainly due to the continuation and expansion of foreign trade surplus and capital account surplus. However, it was not until 1999 that China's foreign debt balance/foreign exchange reserve index really operated within the internationally recognized safety line (100%), and at this time China had net foreign creditor's rights. Compared with the operation of foreign debt balance/foreign exchange reserve index, there are three differences in the operation of short-term foreign debt/foreign exchange reserve ratio index in China. First, there is no obvious upward process but the downward trend is obvious; Second, enter a safe state earlier; Third, in recent years, it has repeatedly looked up and constantly tested the level of safety line. 1985 China's short-term foreign debt was 2.5 times that of foreign debt reserves and 6 times that of the internationally recognized 35% safety line, which also showed that China's foreign debt situation was quite urgent at that time. Since then, except for the sharp rebound of 1987, China's short-term foreign debt/foreign exchange reserve ratio has dropped rapidly from 65438+ to 194. However, due to the rapid growth of short-term foreign debt, this proportion has rebounded in recent years.
Basic understanding of China's foreign exchange reserves
Value geometry of foreign exchange reserves
Foreign exchange reserves are the most powerful international liquid assets held by a government. At the macro level, it is helpful to adjust the balance of payments, stabilize the exchange rate of local currency, enhance international reputation and maintain financial security. Since foreign exchange reserves are assets, they certainly have value-added functions, and proper management can bring considerable benefits. According to China's existing reserve scale of nearly 1000 billion US dollars, even if the annual rate of return is only 5% (for many investment products, the 5% rate of return is actually very low, such as the annual rate of return of Goldman Sachs and Coca-Cola stocks is above 20%), the annual investment income is 50 billion US dollars, and then it is converted into RMB at the exchange rate of 1 8, which is 400 billion. It is more than four times the GDP of Hainan Province in 2005 (90.4 billion RMB), twice that of Guizhou Province in 2005 (65.438+094.2 billion RMB), equivalent to that of Jiangxi Province in 2005 (405.6 billion RMB) and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in 2005 (406.3 billion RMB), and certainly higher than that of many provinces such as Qinghai, Ningxia and Gansu. Moreover, GDP is only total income. If compared with the national net output, I don't know how many provinces are higher. Another most intuitive comparison is that it is equivalent to the total enterprise income tax collected by the state in 2005. If the rate of return is increased by 1 percentage point, I am afraid it will be the total tax revenue of a less affluent province in one year. This10 billion dollars is not well used, but it is actually a crime. accounting
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