Declining Chinese investment in US Treasury holdings

China continues to pare its holdings of US Treasuries, leading to market speculations over its motives. The country's stockpile of US government debt hit the lowest level in 14 years at the end of August 2023, with the pace of decline accelerating.

Some analysts said Chinese monetary authorities are leading the move to shore up the yuan, while others blame it for a recent bond rout in the United States.

"Maybe China is behind the rise in US long rates," said Apollo Global Management economist Torsten Slok in a blog posted in early October, when yields on long-term US bonds reached a 16-year high.

China's Treasury holdings started falling steadily after peaking in 2013.

The balance of US Treasurys held by China totaled US$805.4 billion in August, down 40% from a decade earlier, according to data from the US Treasury Department.

China once actively bought the securities with its ample foreign exchange reserves, becoming the second-biggest foreign investor in US Treasuries after Japan. Given the size of its holdings, China's selling could roil US bond prices, pushing up interest rates.

Not everyone, however, agrees with Slok's views, contending that China could just as easily move its holdings to overseas custodians without selling them. Yet many analysts focus on the decline in the country's Treasury balance as a sign of Beijing's strong determination to defend its own currency.

China is facing serious capital flight caused by rising concern about its economic growth and debt burden. In September, capital outflows reached US$75 billion, the biggest such monthly amount since 2016, according to an estimate by Goldman Sachs. This exerts strong downward pressure on the yuan, which now trades at around 7.3 against the dollar, the lowest since 2007.

"China's state-run banks likely dumped the dollar around October 01, National Day," said a currency trader at a foreign bank, echoing the views of his peers. It appears that Chinese authorities urged state-run banks to shore up the yuan against dollars and they responded by selling Treasuries to raise needed funds.

Beijing has spent hundreds of billions of dollars out of its foreign exchange reserves on market interventions since 2015, when its devaluation of the yuan led to declines both in stock and currency prices.

Eager to maintain the current level of foreign reserve balances, Beijing may have pushed state-owned lenders to support the yuan on its behalf, according to analysts.

The yuan's daily reference rates announced by the People's Bank of China show the sense of crisis being felt by authorities. While the gap between the reference rate and the market value has widened to a record level, the official midpoint remains pegged at 7.17 to the dollar since mid-September. As China allows the yuan to fluctuate only within 2% on either side of the midpoint, it looks as if the country has reverted to a fixed-rate system.

Taking advantage of the country's lower interest rates spurred by monetary easing, some speculators engage in carry trade by borrowing in yuan and converting the money into currencies with higher interest rates. Goldman Sachs has proposed clients use borrowed yuan to fund bets on higher-yielding currencies like the Brazilian real and other South American money.

As speculators seek profits by selling the yuan to buy other currencies, an increase in carry trade could further weaken the Chinese currency. Many analysts expect that if such speculative trading increases, Chinese authorities will have no choice but to step in to bolster the yuan -- possibly by unloading Treasuries.

However, the country's foreign currency reserves -- the source of Treasury purchases -- are unlikely to increase as in the past as export growth slows and the amount of foreign investment declines. Efforts by Western countries to de-risk economic ties with China have only begun to take effect.

If China continues to trim its Treasury holdings, market players may see it as a factor pushing up bond yields and thus as a matter of concern for the US Federal Reserve. The unsteady Chinese economy has added yet another unpredictable variable to global financial markets.

 

World leading currencies out of sync

Leading global currencies are rarely on different paths. Yet Japan's yen and China's yuan are slumping against the US dollar, while in Europe the euro is outperforming and sterling is on a tear, says a Reuters report.

"We've got a one in a 100 years pandemic and once in 75 years war and a once in 25 years energy crisis all thrown into the mix together," said SocGen's Juckes. "You’ve got to be 120 years old to have any understanding of this."

With economic and monetary policy outlooks varying, currency moves are increasingly out of sync with each other. This is making the US$7.5 trillion a day global FX market - operating in the aftermath of COVID-19 and the face of war in Ukraine and an energy crisis - more volatile and more unpredictable.

"It used to be the case that if you got the direction of euro/dollar right, you had a good chance of getting everything else right, but now it's a bit harder," said Nomura's G10 FX strategist Jordan Rochester.

The differences between currencies are widening.

Last year alone, the euro fell to a 20-year low versus the US dollar, sterling hit its lowest on record and the yen its weakest in 32 years, as the greenback soared broadly on sharp increases in US interest rates to curb inflation that other major central banks lagged.

The Bank of Japan has dashed expectations that a change to its ultra-dovish monetary policy would come early in 2023, sending the Japanese yen down 9% so far this year, on top of a 12% decline in 2022. That has raised the chance of intervention to stem weakness.

More pain is also anticipated for the yuan, trading near seven-month lows, as well as smaller Asian currencies.

Meanwhile the euro is up 2.5% this month against the US dollar and expected to rise further given a hawkish European Central Bank - and sterling has meanwhile risen over 5% so far in 2023, leaving it set for its biggest annual gain since 2017.

Rochester said Nomura forecast the euro moving to US$1.12 over coming months, implying a further 2% gain from US$1.095 now, and expected the yuan to weaken to 7.30 per dollar versus 7.2 now.

The yuan has slid almost 5% so far this year, hurt by a weak economy and a wide interest-rate gap with the United States.

This week Chinese authorities set a stronger than expected trading band for the currency, a sign that Beijing is increasingly uncomfortable with its quickening slide.

Lee Hardman, senior FX strategist at MUFG, said the dollar's rebound against Asian currencies reflected a reversal of the trades put in place late last year with the post lockdown reopening of China's economy, as pessimism about the growth outlook there grew.

Elsewhere the dollar is not performing as well. It's continuing to weaken against some European currencies and also Latin American currencies.

Hardman said that, as market volatility slows compared to recent years, investors were focusing more on carry trades, exploiting the variances in interest rates and monetary cycles between different central banks.

Kit Juckes, head of FX strategy at Societe Generale, said the focus on monetary policy differences was also a result of uncertainties elsewhere.

"What strikes me at the moment about FX markets is they are more short-term interest rate sensitive than I can remember them being.

"Because we are so uncertain about so many things in this most unusual of economic cycles, we're just going to focus on what the next central bank policy move is."

This is not good news for the yen, near seven-month lows against the US dollar and 15-year lows versus the euro, as the Bank of Japan holds fast to its ultra-loose monetary policy.

Of course given what the world has endured in the past few years, it is maybe not surprising that currency markets have gone a little strange.

 

Can Yuan Replace US Dollar?

Chinese entrepreneur Wang Min is delighted about Russia's embrace of the yuan. His LED lights company can price contracts to Russian customers in yuan rather than dollars or euros, and they can pay him in yuan. It's win-win, he says.

Wang's plans have been transformed by the conflict in Ukraine and the subsequent Western sanctions on Moscow that have shut Russia's banks and many of its companies out of the dollar and euro payment systems.

His contract manufacturing business with Russia has been small in the past, but now he's preparing to invest in warehousing there.

"We hope that next year sales in Russia can account for 10-15% of our total sales," said the businessman from China's southern coastal province of Guangdong, whose annual revenue of about US$20 million mainly comes from Africa and South America.

Wang is seeking to capitalize on a rapid "yuanization" of Russia's economy this year as the isolated country seeks financial security from Asian powerhouse China. He sees a win-win situation in Chinese exporters reducing their currency risks and payment becoming more convenient for Russian buyers.

While the yuan, or renminbi, has been making gradual inroads into Russia for years, the crawl has turned into a sprint in the past nine months as the currency has swept into the country's markets and trade flows, according to a Reuters review of data and interviews with 10 business and finance players.

Russia's financial shift eastwards could boost cross-border commerce, present a growing economic counterweight to the dollar and limit Western efforts to pressure Moscow by economic means.

Total transactions in the yuan-rouble pair on the Moscow Exchange ballooned to an average of almost 9 billion yuan (US$1.25 billion) a day last month, exchange data analyzed by Reuters showed. Previously, they rarely exceeded 1 billion yuan in an entire week.

"What happened was that it became suddenly very risky and expensive to keep traditional currencies - dollar, euro, British pounds," said Andrei Akopian, Managing Director of Moscow-based investment firm Caderus Capital, citing the potential danger of a bank that keeps foreign currency deposits being sanctioned.

"Everybody was motivated and even pushed towards the rouble or other currencies including, and first of all, the renminbi."

Indeed, yuan-rouble trading totalled 185 billion yuan in October, more than 80 times the level seen in February when Russia launched what it refers to as a special military operation in Ukraine near the end of the month, according to exchange data.

The surge of interest has seen the yuan's share of the currency market jump to 40-45% from less than 1% at the start of the year, said Dmitry Piskulov, international projects head at the Moscow Exchange's foreign-exchange market department.

By comparison, the dollar/rouble pair, which commanded more than 80% of trading volumes on the Russian market in January, has seen its share drop to about 40% as of October, according to exchange data and the central bank.

Until April, Russia didn't even make the top 15 list of countries using the yuan outside mainland China, in terms of the value of inbound and outbound flows, according to data from global financial networking system SWIFT.

It has since jumped to No. 4, lagging only Hong Kong, the city's former colonial ruler Britain and Singapore.

To put this in a global context, though, the dollar and euro are still by far the dominant currencies, representing more than 42% and 35% of flows respectively as of September this year. The yuan has risen to almost 2.5% from below 2% two years earlier.

Wang's business optimism is echoed by Shen Muhui, who heads a trade group for small exporters to Russia in neighbouring Fujian province. He said more and more Russian buyers were opening yuan accounts and settling transactions directly in the Chinese currency, which he said was a big advantage.

"The Russia-Ukraine conflict has brought opportunities for Chinese businessman," said Shen, adding that his association had received many inquiries from Chinese companies interested in doing business in Russia.

It's not only Chinese companies, or small companies, joining the yuan train. Seven Russian corporate giants, including Rusal, Rosneft and Polyus, have raised a total of 42 billion yuan in bonds on the Russian market, according to Reuters calculations, and the list could grow with No.1 lender Sberbank and oil firm Gazpromneft saying they're also considering renminbi debt.

Aluminium producer Rusal, which buys raw materials from China and then sells a large chunk of its finished goods there, told Reuters it had stepped up the share of yuan used in those purchases and sales this year, and that the share would continue to rise, though it declined to provide a detailed breakdown.

While President Vladimir Putin has long sought to reduce Russia's reliance on the dollar, geopolitics has turbo-charged this trend in 2022.

China, the world's No. 2 economy, is the biggest global power not to join economic sanctions against Russia. Indeed, Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping sealed a no limits partnership in February, weeks before Moscow launched what it describes as a "special military operation" in Ukraine.

The yuan comprised about 19% of Russia's trade settlements with China in 2021 versus the dollar's 49% share, Andrey Melnikov, deputy director at international cooperation department at the Russian central bank, said in September.

While 2022 figures haven't been published yet, the Chinese currency is gaining ground, according to Melnikov, who told a conference that demand for yuan liquidity had risen sharply due to reduced access to traditional payment methods and the freezing of its overseas gold and foreign exchange reserves.

The central bank declined to comment for this article.

Bank governor Elvira Nabiullina is tracking the growth, telling lawmakers this month that the influx of yuan illustrated a transformation of the currency composition of our economy.

Regulators are also aware of potential perils, such as a disparity between a growing number of yuan-held current accounts and deposits of the currency, with yuan-denominated lending only starting to develop.

The central bank has said lenders should seek to reduce the growing risks of yuanization of their balance sheets - or gaps between yuan assets and liabilities - by increasing payments in yuan for imports, investing in yuan-denominated securities or using yuan in trade transactions with other countries.

Regulators do not plan to limit yuan usage now and may encourage banks to use more by relaxing provisioning requirements for the currency while tightening them for dollars and euros, Elizaveta Danilova, director at the central bank's financial stability department, told a conference this month.