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Hvor stor er risikoen for ny USA-Kina konflikt?

Hugo Gaarden

fredag 29. maj 2020 kl. 10:00

Spændingerne mellem USA og Kina vil uvægerligt stige i de kommende måneder, vurderer ABN Amro. Der vil ske en yderligere de-coupling af økonomien mellem de to lande, men den udvikling har været på vej siden 2018, og corona-krisen forværrer den. De to lande bliver mindre og mindre afhængige af hinanden, og begge store partier i USA ventes at føre en hård anti-kinesisk valgkamp. Ender den aktuelle spænding omkring Hongkong med sanktioner og en optrappet handelskrig, kan det blive en virkelig game-changer mellem supermagterne.

Uddrag fra ABN Amro:

How big are the risks from the US-China escalation?

Global Macro: US-China tensions building, but not yet a cyclical game-changer – Following Beijing’s plan presented in its annual National People’s Congress to impose a new security law governing Hong Kong, US Secretary of State Pompeo overnight declared to Congress the territory as ‘no longer autonomous from China’.

While this move has no immediate implications, it does pave the way for Congress to revoke the territory’s special trade and investment status and to make it equivalent to China. This would erect considerable trade and investment barriers to Hong Kong, and potentially opens up a new front in the geopolitical tensions between the US and China.

This comes alongside a host of other measures the US has targeted China with recently, including: tightening rules regarding the supply of semiconductors to Huawei, blacklisting 33 Chinese entities and imposing technology export restrictions, restrictions on Chinese companies listing on US stock exchanges, the halting of investments by the federal government pension fund in Chinese stocks, and imposing sanctions on Chinese officials deemed responsible for the treatment of Uighurs.

More broadly, with US presidential elections due in November and the US president having lost his ‘trump card’ of a solid domestic economy, Mr. Trump is openly blaming China (and the WHO) for their respective roles in the covid-19 crisis, in part to position versus Democratic candidate Biden and to divert from the crisis at home.

Decoupling is now more of a structural rather than a cyclical story – All of this takes the US and China further down the path of decoupling, a process that started in 2018 with the tit-for-tat trade war. This is confirmed by the collapse in import shares each country has in their respective trade flows.

Since peaking at 23.6% in February 2018, the share of Chinese goods in US imports has fallen to just 18.6% as of March 2020 – the lowest since December 2006 (monthly numbers are volatile, so we take the 12m sum). For China, the equivalent US share has fallen from around 8.5% at end 2017 to a multiyear low of 6%, although stabilising in recent months.

Full implementation of the Phase One Trade Deal could mean trade shares continue to stabilise in the short term, but broadly speaking we expect decoupling to continue. Indeed, while the shock of the start of decoupling led to a global cyclical slowdown before the covid-19 recessions, it is now becoming more of a longer term structural shift that weighs on global potential growth – particularly given that the fallout from covid-19 is now by far the dominating cyclical driver.


Re-escalation of tariff war would be a game changer – What could change matters would be a major re-escalation of the trade war, if it involved much more punitive tariffs that required abrupt changes to supply chains. This is not something we expect as a base case, but clearly the ramping up in geopolitical tensions raises that risk.

For now, progress on the implementation of the US-China Phase 1 trade deal signed in January has stalled, and there is little sign of negotiations on Phase 2. The covid-19 crisis has likely played a role given the generalised slowdowns in trade flows we are seeing globally, and the disruptions to supply chains in the US make it more difficult to raise certain exports to China (e.g. ethanol, pork).

All in all, given the reconfirmed commitment to the deal by Beijing last week, we do not yet expect it to be torn up and a re-escalation of the tariff war; such a move would be a political decision. In any case, tensions are likely to continue to build over the coming months, particularly as we get closer to the presidential election – when both Republicans and Democrats are likely to want to sound ‘tough on China’.

It will be important in that environment to distinguish between aggressive rhetoric – which could nonetheless have big market impacts – and concrete policy changes that affect the macro outlook.

 

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