鞠建东出席中国发展高层论坛详述中美贸易战最大成本

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鞠建东教授参与的探讨环节是“中美贸易战：谁在承担关税成本”，该环节是由凤凰卫视财经评论员朱文晖主持，与会嘉宾分别为国际战略研究中心中国商务和经济董事讲座主任甘思德、清华大学五道口金融学院紫光讲席教授鞠建东、卡内基国际和平研究院杰出学者包道格、国是金融改革研究院院长刘胜军、彼得森国际经济研究所高级研究院加利•胡弗鲍尔、对外经济贸易大学中国WTO研究院院长屠新泉、马耳他总理特使、马耳他常驻世界贸易组织代表亚力克斯•塞贝拉斯•特里戈纳。

鞠建东教授从国际货币体系稳态的基准理论出发，指出美元和人民币之间存在国际货币地位和实体经济不匹配的失衡格局。历史上，美国和英国也存在相似的错位，从美国实体经济超过英国，到美元赶超英镑隔了五十多年，期间爆发了两次世界大战。当前的错位，并没有对世界的稳定构成影响，不稳定始于特朗普总统向中国发起贸易挑战。在此之前，两国GDP之和占世界总体的40%，人民币和美元在交易中的份额之和占全球货币的约45%，是完美匹配的；而当中美两国合作的局面破裂，不协调和不匹配的问题都会暴露出来。鞠教授强调，贸易战的代价就是世界实体经济和金融体系的不稳定加剧。

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Thank the organizers of CDF to invite me. So, let me explain: the question is what is the cost. First of all, one of the theory about money and the real economy is that the money and real economy should match. So what I have here, the vertical axis is the money, the position of the country’s currency share. And the horizontal axis is actually the GDP share of the country. So from theory, it should be a forty-five-degree line, which means that the GDP share of one country should be matched by the country’s currency in terms of transactions. That’s the theory, that should be applied to the practice.

So let me go to the practice. Well, in practice, if we exclude United States and China, and look at the rest of countries, particularly for Europe. You will see, in practice, it exactingly matches. And for Europe, it’s exactly one to one. The GDP of the Europe is about 16 percent of the world share. And their money share is about 16 percent in the world money transactions. So for the Europe it exactly matches. And you could also see this for Japan and Japanese yuan, for U.K. and British pound, and for many other countries that their money exactly matches the real economy.

Now let’s add US and China and see what happens. Here, we can see, the currency share of the U.S. is about 43% percent. But the GDP share of the U.S. is only less than 25 percent. That’s the US. But how about China? The GDP share is about 15 percent. But China’s RMB share in foreign money transactions is less than 2 percent. So if we considerate US and China, we see mismatch between the real economy and money.

So when we have this mismatch, we say fundamental disalignment. But then what happened? Recall the history, US’s real economy exceeded the Britain in 1894. US dollars take the position exceeding the pound in 1953. It’s not necessarily matching at the same time. It took about 50 years. However, in these mismatch period, there were two world wars. And now we have this mismatch. Is the world economy stable? It is! Before March 23rd, 2018. Before President Trump added the tax to China. Why? Recall this lunch, we heard that Friedman say: “you cannot really treat US and China as two separate economies. At least, before last year.” Yes, it was! One country, two systems.

So if you see US and China as a whole. To add their GDP and money together, what do you have? For GDP share, 25% plus 15% is 40% percent. For money, it should be 43% plus 2% which is 45% percent. It exactingly matches. Because the US and China is the like one country and two systems, and if it were 2018, the world economy was stable, and the real economy and money were matched. So that is what happened, if you ask me what is the real cost for US-China trade war. Before the US-China trade war, this situation of one country, two systems make the world economy alive. It’s stable. However, when we are entering this US-China trade war, when the U.S. and China break up, we enter a fundamentally disalignment period.

Now welcome to our unstable world. What is the cost of US-China trade war? Unstablity for real economy and money. Thank you.