Text: Yan Ansheng
Since 2018, the United States has continued to suppress China, full of tricks, first to launch a ** war against China, followed by a scientific and technological war, a financial war, and a comprehensive encirclement and blockade of China in the economic field with its Western allies, but what the United States did not expect is that these killer tricks that are very effective for other countries have no effect on China. Since China cannot be strangled through various economic wars and scientific and technological wars, it is necessary to smear and undermine China through first-class wars, and ultimately achieve the goal of undermining China's development process. Following the claim that Biden claimed that China's economy is a "time bomb" on August 10, 2023, on December 5, 2023, the international rating agency Moody's Ratings issued a report to once again smear and sing the Chinese economy. Moody's action was immediately met with rebuttals and criticism from Chinese officials, who pointed out that Moody's report did not match the actual performance of the Chinese economy, exaggerated the risks to the Chinese economy, and underestimated the resilience and potential of China's economic growth.
Moody's came out to sing the praises of China's economy
In fact, Moody's outlook for China's credit rating is quite different from that of authoritative international institutions such as the International Monetary Organization and the World Bank. The International Monetary Organization expects China to contribute more than 30% to global economic growth in 2023. Earlier, the World Bank, the International Monetary Organization, and the OECD all showed that China could achieve the expected growth target of 5% in 2023. In the eyes of the vast majority of international organizations and institutions, China's economy has always been the most important engine driving world economic growth, and it is the beautiful scenery with the best performance of the world economy.
Moody's, an international rating agency, has repeatedly smeared and undermined China's economy.
So, in the face of the tremendous achievements of China's economic transformation and upgrading and the gradual improvement of high-quality development, why does Moody's give a negative outlook on China's economic sovereign rating? There are three main reasons: First, it was deliberately done in accordance with the requirements of the United States. Although Moody's is known as an international credit rating agency, it is the mouthpiece of the United States** in the field of credit rating. In the past 10 years, out of the need to suppress China's economy, under the arrangement of the United States, Moody's, together with Fitch, Standard & Poor's, and several other so-called international credit rating agencies in the United States, have downgraded China's sovereign credit rating eight times in disregard of facts and alarmism. It can be seen from this that what Moody's did was completely dictated by the will of the United States.
Second, the understanding of China's economy is superficial and unprofessional. Moody's and other so-called international credit rating agencies have been at a superficial level of understanding of China's economy, they do not see the strong resilience and super anti-risk ability of China's economy, let alone the new development pattern of China's economy has entered a virtuous circle, they will only seize individual isolated data to make assumptions, according to their purpose of singing down and smearing to make malicious interpretations, the results are often ridiculous and generous, and their analysis conclusions not only did not affect the confidence of international investors in China. Instead, it exposes the weakness of its unprofessional layman. In particular, its adoption of a double-standard approach, while singing the downplay of China, and trying to sing the praises of the United States, is not only widely criticized, but also is being recognized by more and more ** organizations and international investors.
The third is to try to attract the attention of China's ** and use clumsy means to try to make money in China. Since Moody's and several other so-called international credit rating agencies in the United States have increasingly exposed their true colors as the United States' thugs attacking China, China and companies have maintained a high degree of vigilance against them and cut off their channels for making money in China. In recent years, these credit rating agencies in the United States have been in financial trouble, so they have started to re-enter the Chinese market to make a lot of money. However, their thinking is ridiculous, in the face of China, a country that even the United States cannot shake, they have come up with a trick to deal with some weak and small countries, thinking that lowering China's sovereign credit rating can give China a deterrent, thus giving them the green light in the Chinese market. To their surprise, China does not accept this set at all, and its clumsy behavior not only has no impact on China's economic development and international financing, but completely cuts off its own financial routes, and will be driven out of the Chinese market by China's enterprises and enterprises, and finally ends up with a counterproductive result.
The United States may have even more sinister intentions
As can be seen, after downgrading China's ** sovereign credit outlook on December 5, 2023, Moody's downgraded the outlook for Hong Kong and Macau from "stable" to "negative" the next day. Immediately afterwards, Moody's announced that the rating outlook of 13 Chinese state-owned enterprises and their subsidiaries, two local state-owned enterprises and subsidiaries, 18 large enterprises including Alibaba and Tencent, eight of China's most important banks, and 10 Chinese insurance companies were downgraded from "stable" to "negative". Moody's such a big move has aroused great concern and vigilance in China, and the Chinese people are watching what follow-up actions from the United States will be after Moody's move? Will there be a new financial war after the ** war, the technology war, the currency war, and the ** war? It is worth the vigilance of the Chinese people.
The downgrade is the beginning of an all-out financial war waged by the United States against China.
First, whether Fitch and Standard & Poor's will follow in Moody's footsteps. Moody's, Fitch and Standard & Poor's, the three major credit rating agencies, are the three major minions of the United States that control the world's financial discourse, and if Fitch and Standard & Poor's follow Moody's in downgrading the sovereign credit ratings of China** and important companies, then it is likely that the United States will launch a full-scale financial war against China. As Thomas Friedman, author of The World is Flat, put it: "We live in a world of two superpowers, one is the United States and the other is a rating agency. The United States can destroy a country with a bomb, and a rating agency can destroy a country with a bond downgrade; Sometimes, it's not as powerful as to which of the two is greater. "The United States knows very well that it cannot defeat China by military means, and since 2018, the first war and technological war launched by the United States against China have not been able to shake China, so there is only a risky move left in a comprehensive three-dimensional financial war, and it is the usual winning trick of the United States to sacrifice the bomb of credit rating first. However, Americans still fail to realize that China is too large and has a very sound prevention mechanism, and the United States has no chance of winning at all.
Second, whether the financial predators of the United States will launch a financial attack. Regardless of whether the downgrading of China's sovereign credit rating by credit rating agencies will work, if the United States were to carry out a financial attack on China, the next step would be the international financial predators of the United States. With the United States as their headquarters base and cloaked in various cloak of hedging, investment, insurance, and trust, these financial predators will first set off a monstrous wave in Hong Kong's financial market and carry out large-scale attacks on Hong Kong's real estate market, the real estate market, the foreign exchange market, and the bond market, thereby paralyzing Hong Kong's financial market in order to achieve the goal of striking at China. Judging from the behavior of some hedging ** in the United States in the Hong Kong financial market in recent years, various financial predators in the United States have already laid out in the Hong Kong financial market. Since China was able to effectively defend Hong Kong's financial market in 1998, its confidence and determination will be firmer and more confident. Taking 10,000 steps back, even if Hong Kong's financial market is paralyzed by the US financial predators, the impact on China will be very limited or even slight.
Third, will the United States exclude China from the International Monetary Organization and the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication? If these two tactics do not work, the United States will have one last resort, which is to remove China from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) settlement system, and at the same time remove China's renminbi from the International Monetary Organization's Special Drawing Rights basket of currencies. Judging from the effect of the US sanctions on Russia and its kicking out of the SWIFT system, it can be asserted that if the United States resorts to this shady trick to deal with China, the United States will not only fail to achieve its goal of defeating China, but will also completely collapse the hegemony of the US dollar, and the US dollar's international monetary hegemony will no longer exist. You know, China is much stronger than Russia, China has its own international currency settlement system (CIPS), China is the world's largest power, is the world's more than 140 countries in the world's largest partner, China can use the RMB at any time to replace the dollar with most countries in the world for settlement. If this is the case, the series of first-class science and technology financial wars launched by the United States against China will be completely declared a failure and will go into decline.
Although the above ** may not become a reality, we in China have to guard against the bottomless suppression and attack of the United States, and we must not take it lightly!
Short China is visible to the naked eye
Although it remains to be seen whether the United States will launch a new financial war against China at all costs, it is visible to the naked eye that while singing about the decline of China's economy, the United States is using all market forces to short China's economy in an attempt to trigger international investors to follow suit. At present, the main tricks of the United States to short China's economy are as follows:
First, short the RMB. Since the Bretton Woods Conference established the hegemony of the dollar in 1944, the dollar has dominated the world for more than half a century, and the hegemony of the dollar and the military, science and technology, and economy of the United States echo each other, and have become an important magic weapon for the United States to dominate and exploit the world. Although in the second half of the last century, there were two strong currencies, the yen and the euro, especially the euro, which once overshadowed the limelight of the dollar and had the momentum to replace it, but the United States created a war in Europe through its military hegemony, which made the euro's good prospects short-lived, and now the euro and the yen have long lost the ability to challenge the hegemony of the dollar and have completely become vassals of the dollar. However, in recent years, China's renminbi has sprung up, and the fate of the yen and the euro is different, China is completely not controlled by the United States, and China's actual economic volume is comparable to that of the United States, and China's scientific and technological level is also catching up with the United States. Nowadays, the status of the RMB as an international settlement currency and an international reserve currency cannot be compared with the US dollar, but it surpasses the yen and the pound to catch up with the euro, and it is particularly striking that the rise of RMB internationalization is all-round, China has not only established its own RMB international settlement system, but also is building the RMB settlement of the oil market and other commodity markets, at the same time, China has signed currency swap agreements with other countries, as well as leading the construction of a new type of international financial organization and other initiatives, All-round layout of the RMB internationalization strategy, so as to comprehensively challenge and shake the hegemony of the US dollar. In this regard, the United States has a deep hatred for the renminbi, and thinks about how to put the renminbi to death all day long. All along, the United States has been stirring up trouble in the Taiwan Strait and mobilizing the Philippines in the South China Sea to make trouble against China, in an attempt to create conflicts around China and scare away international capital in China. In recent years, international financial predators led by the United States have shorted the renminbi in the offshore RMB market in an attempt to make the renminbi exchange rate out of control, which is also another bad practice of the United States shorting the renminbi.
The United States' attempt to use military, scientific, technological, and economic means to turn the renminbi into a vassal of the US dollar has completely failed to do so.
Second, decoupling from China. As we all know, the stability of the renminbi exchange rate depends on China's balance of payments, and if China's balance of payments is unbalanced and there is a large deficit, then the renminbi exchange rate may rise and fall sharply or even slide into the abyss of great depreciation, thus losing trust with international investors and the global financial market. In China's balance of payments, investment from the international community is an important component, and if there is a large amount of capital outflow in the short term or if the capital outflow is greater than the capital inflow in the long term, then it may bring great pressure to the stability of the RMB exchange rate. Since 2020, the then ** Trump of the United States has clamored to decouple from China's economy and let China's manufacturing industry move to the United States, not only that, but the United States has also mobilized its Western allies to decouple from China, and its sinister intention is to create panic about international capital investing in China, so as to make international companies and international investors, including the United States, withdraw from China, so that China's industry is in a process of continuous blood loss, which will eventually lead to an imbalance in China's balance of payments and shake the stable foundation of the RMB exchange rate. Undermine the process of RMB internationalization. If the United States succeeds in its wishful thinking, China's economy will inevitably suffer a major blow, and there may be a recession or a long-term slump, thus providing strong evidence for the delusion that China's economy will never surpass the United States. Although three years have passed, the United States has not been able to decouple from China, and international capital has not been greatly affected by the United States' demagogy, but it is true that some international companies, including American merchants, have moved their production lines and chains out of China, which has affected China's economy to a certain extent.
Third, short China's capital market. Since 2014, with the launch of a series of interconnection mechanisms between China's capital market and the international capital market, such as Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect, Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect, Shanghai-London Stock Connect and Bond Connect, international capital, especially international hot money, can enter China's capital market through multiple channels to share the dividends of China's economic growth. However, these channels have also facilitated the infiltration of US financial predators in China's capital market. In recent years, the financial predators of the United States have not only carried out a comprehensive layout in the Hong Kong capital market, but also quietly entered the Chinese capital market and lurked, and at the moment in order to actively cooperate with the needs of the United States to sing down China's economic prospects and continue to short China, there is evidence that China's A** field has recently suffered from the continuous selling pressure of international capital, and the performance is sluggish, which is mainly the financial predators of the United States who are making trouble. In addition, U.S. financial predators have also directly or indirectly shorted other financial markets in China by selling Chinese bonds and real estate assets. Therefore, people see that the Shanghai A** field has been staging a defense battle at the important mark of 3,000 points, China's property market and even the property prices of the four major first-tier cities have been falling endlessly, and behind these market phenomena are the shadow of American financial predators.
However, it is fortunate that both the exchange rate formation mechanism of the renminbi and China's capital market have a sufficiently complete firewall, and the attempt of the United States and the financial predators of the United States to disrupt China's financial market from the inside is completely wishful thinking. Next, what will the United States have new tricks and tricks to short China? We'll see.
(The author is the vice chairman of the Hong Kong Periodicals Media Association).