中国外汇储备的安全性研究

外汇储备的安全性关系到我国的金融安全,已成为我国经济发展中亟待研究解决的一个重要问题。我国的外汇储备保持了高于常规水平的规模,外汇储备广义上的安全性处于良好状态,高额外汇储备为金融安全增加了保险系数;而我国外汇储备狭义上的安全性,即外汇储备资产本身的安全却令人担忧,已经为高额的外汇储备付出巨大成本和承担了很高的风险,特别是在美元弱势明显的情况下将要进一步承受巨大的损失风险。同时高额外汇储备也对我国经济发展产生了一系列负面影响和风险,如果从这个意义上来看,我国外汇储备的现状已成为威胁金融安全的一个重要隐患。我国在外汇储备规模方面存在的种种理论误区,导致了政策偏差,使得我国外汇储备处于高风险状况之中。因此,我国外汇储备政策的调整已经刻不容缓。     

Why Commercial Banks Held Excess Reserves: The Japanese Experience of the Late 1990s

We investigated, empirically, why Japanese banks held excess reserves in the late 1990s. Specifically, we pin down two factors explaining the demand for excess reserves: a low short-term interest rate, or call rate, and the fragile financial health of banks. The virtually zero call rate increased the demand for excess reserves substantially, and a high bad loans ratio largely contributed to the increase in excess reserve holdings. We found that the holdings of excess reserves would fall by two-thirds if the call rate were to be raised to its level prior to the adoption of the zero-interest-rate policy, and the bad loans ratio were to fall by 50%.     

Voluntary Reserve Targets

We study monetary policy implementation through an operating regime involving voluntary reserve targets (VRTs). Operating regimes based on reserve requirements may lead to a collapse in interbank trade, as they have since the financial crisis. We show that, no matter the abundance of reserves, VRTs encourage market activity and support the central bank's control over interest rates. We consider (i) the impact of anticipated and unanticipated liquidity injections by the central bank on market outcomes and (ii) a comparison with the implementation framework currently adopted by the Federal Reserve. Overall, a VRT framework may provide several advantages over other frameworks.     

Accounting for the furniture,fittings & equipment reserve in hotels

The somewhat idiosyncratic accounting procedure of maintaining reserves to fund furniture, fittings and equipment (FF&E) capital expenditure in hotels mediated by a management contract is examined. Five research objectives have been pursued: (i) ascertaining contrasting motives of owners and operators with respect to FF&E reserve accounting; (ii) determining FF&E reserve accounting approaches adopted in hotels; (iii) determining the amount assigned to FF&E reserves in hotels; (iv) determining the sufficiency of FF&E reserves in hotels; and (v) appraising the degree of ease with which hotel operators can draw on FF&E reserve funds. These objectives have been pursued through the analysis of qualitative field data as well as survey data collected in Australia and New Zealand. The study’s more significant findings include the determination that, consistent with the wishes of operators, maintaining cash funded FF&E reserves is the most popular approach (particularly in small hotels). It has also been found that FF&E reserves are 40 per cent underfunded. This deficiency beckons a question over whether hotel FF&E reserve accounting serves any meaningful role.     

Learning and shifts in long-run productivity growth

An extensive literature has analyzed the macroeconomic effects of shocks to the level of aggregate productivity; however, there has been little corresponding research on sustained shifts in the growth rate of productivity. In this paper, we examine the effects of shocks to productivity growth in a dynamic general equilibrium model where agents do not directly observe whether shocks are transitory or persistent. We show that an estimated Kalman filter model using real-time data describes economists’ long-run productivity growth forecasts in the United States extremely well and that filtering has profound implications for the macroeconomic effects of shifts in productivity growth.     

对我国外汇储备规模、结构及利用的探讨

自2006年我国外汇储备超过日本成为世界第一储备大国之后,至2010年底的短短4年时间,已超过2.8万亿美元。巨额的外汇储备固然证明综合国力的强大,对确保国际支付、汇率调控和社会经济安全等十分有利,但也会带来外汇储备成本高、外汇资产利用效率低、引起国际经济贸易摩擦等一系列负面影响。为此,确定一个适度的储备规模,调整好储备资产结构,合理有效地利用超额外汇储备去改善国内经济和产业结构,进一步开拓国际商品和资本市场,是符合科学发展观,促进我国经济又好又快地可持续发展的明智之举。     

浅议黄金储备与金融安全

黄金是一种重要的储备资产,其在历次金融危机中的表现提示我们,必须重视黄金储备。与其他国家相比,我国黄金储备明显偏低。适时扩大黄金储备在国际储备中的占比,是发挥其金融安全保障职能的合理选择。     

The Future of International Liquidity and the Role of China*

China has prospered from its strategy of reserve accumulation and related export surplus. But the strategy has drawbacks. Open‐ended reserve accumulation has left the the economy exposed to an eventual devaluation of the dollar, and reliance on exports has left it exposed to a downturn in rich‐world consumption. China thus has an incentive to rethink both halves of its model—to accumulate fewer reserves, on the one hand, and to run a smaller current‐account surplus on the other. Recent steps such as faster renminbi appreciation, the new Five‐Year Plan, and announced shifts in reserve strategy will move China in this direction— and other emerging economies may well follow. This article analyzes the likely consequences of internationalization of the Chinese renminbi for the global monetary system and its possible ascension to reserve currency status. It argues that if the process proves feasible, despite the difficult hurdles along the way, the results of internationalization would be constructive, both for China and the rest of the world. If emerging‐market central banks and other reserve managers (such as sovereign wealth funds) continue overwhelmingly to favor the dollar and a small set of other developed‐market reserve currencies as a store of value, the world risks a third crisis of the global reserve system. This would be a rerun in a somewhat different guise of the well‐known paradox described by economist Robert Triffin, whereby the demand for international liquidity, when loaded onto a small set of national currencies, ends up destabilizing the system as the key reserve suppliers issue more and more assets and hence build up unsustainable debts. (Such forces, Triffin argued, were a main cause of the 1930s crisis of the gold exchange standard; and as he predicted, those forces emerged again in the 1970s to destabilize the dollar‐and goldbased Bretton Woods system.) In today's global monetary system, the emergence of the renminbi (along with other developed‐ and emerging‐market currencies) as a potential reserve currency would expand and diversify the supply of reserve assets, enabling central banks to maintain large buffers against financial shocks while allowing the United States to stop issuing a large and growing bulk of the world's safe and liquid claims, and thus bearing the burden of an everexpanding, and ultimately questionable, debt to the rest of the world.     

Robustness and real consequences of nominal wage rigidity

Nominal wage rigidity has been shown to exist in periods of high inflation, while reduction in nominal pay has been hypothesized to occur in times of low inflation. Nominal wage rigidity would therefore become irrelevant because there is little need to cut nominal pay under high inflation, while the necessary cuts would occur under low inflation. We test this hypothesis by examining Swiss data in the 1990s, where wage inflation was low. Nominal wage rigidity proves robust in a low inflation environment, constituting a considerable obstacle to real wage adjustments. Real wages would indeed respond to unemployment without downward nominal rigidity. Moreover, wage sweep-ups caused by nominal rigidity correlate strongly to unemployment, suggesting downward nominal wage rigidity fuels unemployment.     

Interest on bank reserves and optimal sweeping

A key rationale offered by the Federal Reserve for the payment of interest on reserves was to remove the incentive for banks to operate sweep accounts. Sweeping shifts funds from transactions deposits subject to reserve requirements to non-reservable deposits. This paper extends a conventional banking model to analyze sweeping behavior. Sweeping responds positively to increases in bank loan rates and reserve ratios and negatively to increases in the interest rate on reserves or exogenous increases in bank equity. Sweeping generates greater responsiveness in lending to changes in loan rates or the interest rate on reserves and lower responsiveness to changes in reserve ratios or equity than in its absence. Empirical analysis of an explicit condition that we derive suggests that, with an unchanged reserve requirement, the Fed could eliminate sweeping by setting the interest rate on reserves to no less than approximately 4% points below the market loan rate.     

人民币汇率与外汇储备相关性的学术演进与当下对策

随着人民币汇率上下波动难测及中国外汇储备不断累积,国内关于此领域的研究也日益丰富。人民币汇率波动的特征、我国外汇储备的规模和资产结构是否合理、人民币汇率与外汇储备之间存在怎样的关系,国内学者对这些问题做了大量的研究,当然结论也不尽相同。本文对国内相关文献进行了梳理和逻辑推演,以引起更多的学术关注,为相关部门提供决策依据。     

Interest rate corridors and reserves

This paper evaluates reserves regimes versus interest rate corridors, which have become competing frameworks for monetary policy implementation. Rate corridors, relying on lending and deposit facilities to create ceilings and floors for overnight interest rates, evince mixed results on controlling volatility. Reserve requirements allow period-average smoothing of interest rates but, even if remunerated, are subject to reserve avoidance activities. A system of voluntary, period-average reserve commitments could offer equivalent rate-smoothing advantages. If central banks created symmetric opportunity costs of meeting or falling short of period-average reserve requirements (or commitments), they could achieve flat reserve demand on settlement day.     

无息准备金制度及其在我国实施的可行性探析

近年来我国面临短期资本大量涌入的困扰,但从实践情况来看,现有的管制及冲销政策效果不佳。本文对国际上无息准备金制度作了介绍,并分析了我国实施该制度的可行性及准备金征收范围、比率等具体注意事项,并在此基础上提出了实施无息准备金制度的有关建议。     

Exchange market pressure and absorption by international reserves: Emerging markets and fear of reserve loss during the 2008–2009 crisis

This paper evaluates how the global financial crisis emanating from the U.S. was transmitted to emerging markets. Our focus is on the extent that the crisis caused external market pressures (EMP), and whether the absorption of the shock was mainly through exchange rate depreciation or the loss of international reserves. Controlling for variety of factors associated with EMP, we find clear evidence that emerging markets with higher total foreign liabilities, including short- and long-term debt, equities, FDI and derivative products—had greater exposure and were much more vulnerable to the financial crisis. Countries with large balance sheet exposure – high external portfolio liabilities exceeding international reserves—absorbed the global shock by allowing greater exchange rate depreciation and comparatively less reserve loss. Despite the remarkable buildup of international reserves by emerging markets during the period prior to the financial crisis, countries relied primarily on exchange rate deprecation rather than reserve loss to absorb most of the exchange market pressure shock. This could reflect a deliberate choice (“fear of reserve loss”) or market actions that caused very rapid exchange rate adjustment, especially in emerging markets with open capital markets, overwhelming policy actions.     

Economic stability under alternative banking systems: Theory and policy

In this paper we show in a thought experiment that in an economy where i) investors hold rational expectations, ii) output is generated by a linear homogeneous production function, and iii) real investment is allocated across sectors according to the CAPM, a fractional reserve banking system is not Pareto efficient and amplifies the business cycle. In developing these results we show that these three well known propositions in economics also imply a new view of the business cycle, one where the business cycle is described in terms of the dispersion of an ex-ante probability distribution. The policy implication of this analysis is that bank regulation should go further than the Volcker rule or the Vickers commission proposal by restricting bank investments to currency and deposit accounts on the central bank. Nonbank financial institutions should then carry out the financial intermediation function now carried out by banks. The paper proposes that post office banking perhaps augmented with blockchain technology sometime in the future is one way to implement the transition from fractional reserve banking to full reserve banking. While little academic work has been done on full reserve banking in the aftermath of the Great Crisis, it is interesting to note that it is part of banking reform proposals now (July 2016) before the parliament in Iceland and a special national referendum in Switzerland.     

Interaction between housing prices and household borrowing: The Finnish case

Employing time series econometrics this study shows that there has been a significant two-way interaction between housing prices and housing loan stock in Finland since the financial liberalization in the late 1980s. Before the financial deregulation the interaction was substantially weaker. Furthermore, housing appreciation has a notable positive impact on the outstanding consumption loan stock. It appears that there is no similar relationship between stock prices and credit. Understanding the two-way interaction between housing prices and credit is of importance, since the interdependence is likely to augment boom–bust cycles in the economy and increase the fragility of the financial sector.     

Banks, private money, and government regulation

We study competition between inside and outside money in economies with trading frictions and financial intermediation. Claims on banks circulate if the redemption rate is low. When the quantity of fiat money is scarce, coexistence of inside and outside money dominates equilibria with a unique medium of exchange. If outside money is ample, banks choose to redeem claims in outside money, which increases welfare. Under binding reserve requirements, tightening monetary policy leads to credit rationing. Our results support recent trends toward lower reserve requirements. However, we also identify situations where restrictions on note issue are beneficial.     

Monetary policy implementation and the federal funds rate

This paper investigates how the implementation of monetary policy affects the dynamics and the volatility of the federal funds rate. Since the early 1980s, the most important changes in the Fed’s conduct of monetary policy refer to the role of the federal funds rate target and the reserve requirement system. We show that the improved communication and transparency regarding the federal funds rate target has significantly increased the Fed’s influence on the federal funds rate since 1994. By contrast, the declining role of required reserves in the US has contributed to higher federal funds rate volatility. Our results suggest that the introduction of remunerated required reserves will further enhance the controllability of the federal funds rate.     

我国外汇储备结构的优化分析

近年来我国外汇储备的一半以上都投资在了美国债券和以美元表示的不动产上。为最大限度地降低风险,外汇储备结构需适时调整。本文在遵循安全性、流动性、收益性的原则下,结合海勒-奈特模型、杜利模型考虑的相关因素,对我国外汇储备资产结构与币种结构进行优化分析,并给出对策建议。     

盈余储备、投资决策与信息含量——来自我国房地产上市公司1995—2010年的经验证据

自1995年我国实行房屋预售制度以来,房地产上市公司的预收账款占比在总体上呈上升趋势,这种与其他非房地产行业形成鲜明对比的预收账款是否有业绩预示作用?是否有投资决策价值?是否被证券投资者所发现和利用?本文首先构造了预收账款所隐含盈余储备指标的计算公式,其次运用我国房地产上市公司1995—2010年的数据对此进行了验证。