That is the question millions are asking, or at least the question that people who talk about whether China’s government is holding down the value of its currency should be asking. Neil Irwin is on that list.

In a NYT column today he argued that China is no longer holding down the value of the yuan to maintain a competitive advantage in trade. He pointed to their recent sale of reserves to keep the yuan from falling against the dollar and other currencies. However, however his discussion ignores the country’s massive holdings of foreign exchange reserves. 

The conventional rule of thumb is that a country needs reserves that are equal to six months of imports. In China’s case this would be $1 trillion. The country in fact holds more than $3 trillion in reserves. These excess reserves would be expected to keep down the value of the Chinese yuan against the dollar in the same way that the Fed’s holding of more than $3 trillion in assets is thought to hold down long-term interest rates.

As long as China’s central bank holds such a large amount of reserves, it is deliberately keeping down the value of its currency. As a practical matter, we would expect a rapidly growing developing country like China to be running large trade deficits. While its surplus is down from its peak of more than 10 percent of GDP in the last decade, it is still more than 2.0 percent of GDP.

The U.S. trade deficit with China and other matters hugely in the context of an economy that is below full employment. The trade deficit creates a gap in demand that cannot be easily filled from other sources. In principle we could run a larger budget deficit to fill the $500 billion gap (@ 3.0 percent of GDP) created by the trade deficit, but this has proven to be politically impossible.

For this reason, the trade deficit is hugely important since it directly leads to more unemployment. Also, since the wages of the workers at the middle and bottom of the labor market depend hugely on the strength of the labor market, the trade deficit directly reduces the wages of large segments of the U.S. workforce, contributing to the rise in inequality.