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Money memes: Financial repression and China’s extractive elite

Chinese authorities have artificially lowered the interest rates that regular Chinese citizens earn on their savings and have directed these cheap funds to finance “staggeringly unprofitable” state enterprises that spin out wealth for connected elites.

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Stringer/Reuters
A bank clerk counts Chinese yuan banknotes in Huaibei, Anhui province in this June 2012 file photo. Chinese authorities have artificially lowered the interest rates that regular Chinese citizens earn on their savings.

Financial repression and extractive institutions are two of the big memes in international economics today.

Financial repression occurs when governments intervene in financial markets to channel cheap funds to themselves. With sovereign debts skyrocketing, for example, governments may try to force their citizens, banks, and others to finance those debts at artificially low interest rates.

Extractive institutions are policies that attempt to redirect resources to politically-favored elites. Classic examples are the artificial monopolies often granted by governments in what would otherwise be structurally competitive markets. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have recently argued that such institutions are a key reason Why Nations Fail. Inclusive institutions, in contrast, promote widely-shared prosperity.

Over at Bronte Capital, John Hempton brings these two ideas together in an argument that Chinese elites are using financial repression to extract wealth from state-owned enterprises. In a nutshell, he believes Chinese authorities have artificially lowered the interest rates that regular Chinese citizens earn on their savings (that’s the repression), and have directed these cheap funds to finance “staggeringly unprofitable” state enterprises that nonetheless manage to spin out vast wealth for connected elites and their families.

I don’t have the requisite first-hand knowledge to judge his hypothesis myself. But both his original post and recent follow-up addressing feedback are worth a close read.

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