If you understand the root cause of Japan's depression, you will know why we must build new infrastructure.

In recent years, the continuous appreciation of the RMB against the US dollar reminds many people of the Plaza Accord in Japan. Many people believe that it is the appreciation of the yen against the US dollar in this agreement that led to "30 years of economic losses in Japan", because Japan is an industrial producer and relies mainly on exports to the West to maintain rapid economic growth. The appreciation of the yen directly led to a sharp decline in Japan's foreign trade exports and a direct collapse of Japan's domestic economy.

In fact, it is somewhat exaggerated to say that the United States relies on the Plaza Accord to directly attack Japan. When this agreement was signed, Japan was not forced to sign it by the United States. On the contrary, many people in Japan were very supportive at that time.

At best, this agreement only triggered the butterfly effect in the process of Japan's economic downturn, not a fatal blow. What really caused Japan to collapse was actually Japan itself.

As long as we know how the Japanese died before the economic collapse, we can understand why China has taken a series of measures, such as new infrastructure, financial transfer payments, and low-end production capacity transfer.

Let's talk about why the United States signed the Plaza Agreement with Japan.

After World War II, Japan's economy developed rapidly, and its foreign trade remained a surplus, which squeezed the export share of other countries. This is very similar to the current situation in China. We have always had a trade surplus with the United States, so Trump, a businessman, couldn't stand it anymore and took the initiative to launch a trade war against us.

At that time, the situation was similar. The United States and Japan had been fighting a trade war, and there had also been serious conflicts in Japan's advantageous industries such as steel, color TV sets, automobiles, telecommunications and semiconductors. In the 1980s, the domestic economy of the United States was so poor that they wanted to stimulate the depreciation of the US dollar against the Japanese yen and stimulate exports. Therefore, they negotiated with Japan, Germany, Britain and France and wanted to sign an agreement together to artificially depress the value of the dollar.

Therefore, the purpose of signing the Plaza Agreement was to save the depressed economy of the United States at that time, rather than specifically targeting Japan.

Of course, Japan, Germany and other countries know that this will hurt their exports, but concessions to the United States can curb the passionate feelings of trade protectionism in the US Congress, because at that time, quite a few members strongly advocated increasing trade barriers, thus alleviating the unfavorable situation of the US trade deficit.

At that time, global economic integration had achieved initial results, and everyone thought that trade opening was an important trend. At this time, if the United States takes the lead in promoting trade protectionism, it will inevitably affect the process of global economic integration. Moreover, the Soviet Union existed at that time, and these capitalist countries also needed unity. Countries also believe that it is necessary to support the United States in this regard. With him, they can take the lead in resisting the Soviet Union.

For Japan, of course, it has its own considerations. On the one hand, after World War II, the United States did give Japan a lot of support, opened the western market to it, and also supported and transferred some industries and technologies. It is because of this market demand and technological production that Japan has gradually revitalized its economy, and they don't want the United States to accuse them of this.

This is not to say that Japan, Britain, Germany and other countries have many honeymoon periods with the United States, but that the United States and Japan at that time, like China and the United States now, played games, confronted and cooperated constantly, mainly because it was not in the interests of their own national development.

What the Japanese government wants is also in line with Japan's national interests, and it is the internationalization of the yen. They want to further promote the internationalization of the yen through its appreciation.

In addition to the Japanese government agreeing to the contents of the agreement, some big Japanese consortia are also very happy to see it. For example, suppose your family is a Japanese super consortium with assets of 1000 billion yen, corresponding to 1000 billion US dollars. As soon as the Plaza Agreement was signed, your family's 1000 billion yen immediately became 2 billion dollars. Do you want it?

Even the working class with an income of 6.5438+0 million yen could have exchanged for 6.5438+0 million dollars. I'm telling you, once the Plaza Agreement is signed, you can exchange it for 20,000 dollars. Are you happy?

Therefore, when the Plaza Agreement was signed, Japan's finance, commerce, working class and homeowners were extremely happy.

The only unhappy thing is the export of physical manufacturing.

The financial sector can invest in overseas arbitrage, the commercial sector can import raw materials for processing and production, and it is more cost-effective, and it can also acquire and expand overseas, while the working class can buy abroad in buy buy.

A documentary interviewed an ordinary primary school teacher in Japan at that time, saying that he would go to Hawaii for vacation every winter, and he could also go shopping in Europe this summer.

And Sony bought Colombia, and Times Square and Empire State Building were also bought by the Japanese consortium. Japanese travel and shop all over the world. For these groups, things in other parts of the world become cheaper.

In this way, the foreign exchange reserves exchanged by Japanese manufacturing industry for decades are quickly consumed, because these enterprises or individuals still invest or consume in dollars abroad, which has little impact on the internationalization of the yen.

As for the domestic manufacturing industry, because of the appreciation of the yen, the prices of products produced were higher than those of other overseas commodities, and the sales volume was greatly reduced, and finally plummeted. From 1986, Japan's export growth rate dropped rapidly from 2.9% to-16.8% in 1986, and now everything that could be sold overseas can't be sold.

Japan is a big industrial producer, and the appreciation of the yen makes the Japanese become consumers of products from other countries. However, after domestic products are produced, they cannot be sold, resulting in overcapacity and signs of economic crisis.

So, Japan began to worry.

In the face of the newly signed Plaza Agreement, it is impossible for Japan to depress the exchange rate under the power of the United States.

The development of economy needs the pull of the troika of export, investment and consumption. Seeing that exports are hopeless, I want to start with investment and consumption.

This is very similar to the situation in China when the US subprime mortgage crisis broke out in 2008.

At that time, China's economic structure was still heavily dependent on foreign trade, and foreign exports accounted for about 70% of GDP. Due to the impact of the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States, the overseas consumption power has fallen sharply, and the goods made in China cannot be sold, resulting in a serious overcapacity in China. To stabilize the economy, we have to turn to investment and consumption.

In the investment field, China mainly focuses on old infrastructure and real estate, while in the consumption field, it mainly relies on "home appliances going to the countryside" to stimulate the huge rural population to drive consumption! With a combination of punches, China pulled through.

However, Japan is not as big as China, nor has it such a huge consumer population as China, and it cannot be realized in infrastructure investment and other fields because of the limitation of land area.

In the end, Japan is betting on boosting domestic consumption, and the measures taken are to cut interest rates across the board, stimulate domestic consumption, and let its people borrow money to digest excess capacity.

This move can be regarded as a mess.

Why do you say that? Because when the real economy is going down, the funds released by the comprehensive interest rate cut will not go to the manufacturing sector in order to avoid risks, because there is no profit here, and the risk of bad debts is still great.

Nor will it go to a large number of poor people because of poor repayment ability.

In the end, the amount of money released by interest rate cuts tends to the rich class with collateral. This group of people has a small population base, so they can't be expected to buy home appliances or eat, drink and consume after borrowing millions. Unlike the poor, they get money to ensure their survival in the first place, and most of it is used to buy basic materials or improve food and clothing consumption. Moreover, the poor population has a large base, and they are the main force of consumption increase.

Rich people are more likely to invest after the loan. Of course, they will not invest in the real economy with low profits, but choose safer and higher-yielding sectors, such as high-quality real estate and stock market.

In the end, the overall interest rate cut structure led to a serious financial reality, which not only greatly pushed up housing prices and inflated the bubbles in the housing market and the stock market, but also led to domestic inflation and intensified the polarization between the rich and the poor.

With the rising house prices, more and more middle-class people choose to mortgage their existing houses to invest in real estate in order to resist inflation. As a result, the faster the house price rises, the bigger the bubble is.

At this time, the Japanese government really began to panic, because they knew that the interest rate cut was to stimulate consumption and digest excess capacity, rather than letting enterprises and individuals use stocks to speculate on real estate. In this way, the domestic real economy will be hit harder, and the huge real estate bubble will burst sooner or later.

In this economic background, Japan has started the road of raising interest rates and wants to financialize real estate.

1989, Mieno Yasushi, known as the "economic genius", became the governor of the Bank of Japan. This man is known for his resolute work and hates speculation.

After Mieno Yasushi took office, he raised interest rates five times, and finally in 1990, the bank interest rate rose from 2.5% to 6%. Not only did he raise interest rates, but the banks stopped releasing water, and the water sources in the stock market and the property market were cut off. Then, thunderstorm events similar to Evergrande began to blossom everywhere. With the tide of supply interruption in Japan, house prices continued to fall after the discount, and the stock market crash flooded, and hundreds of trillion yen of assets vanished overnight.

Until today, house prices in Japan are still falling. Of course, we are not talking about high-quality real estate in the core area of Tokyo. About high-quality assets, it is the same all over the world. Like gold, high-quality real estate in the core area has its value in troubled times.

The price reduction here refers to the fundamentals of the Japanese property market, and the national average price is still falling, mainly due to the aging of Japan. After many old people died, their houses were empty and their children's houses could not be built. Where is the demand for buying a house?

At this time, some people may ask that the situation in Germany is similar to that in Japan, and it has also signed the Plaza Agreement. Why didn't it collapse like Japan?

Germany also experienced a sharp drop in exports. Like Japan, it is also thinking about solutions, but fortunately East Germany and West Germany have just been unified.

After World War II, Germany was divided into two parts, East Germany and West Germany, unified in 1990, and extra consumption power became the key to solving this dilemma in Germany.

Moreover, Germany has experienced hyperinflation before, so instead of printing money and releasing water like Japan, it transferred part of its production capacity to poorer East Germany.

This can not only provide more cheap labor for these production capacity, reduce production costs and enhance product competitiveness, but also make use of local population to cut production capacity. China is doing the same now, transferring some low-end production capacity that is not very profitable to some countries with low labor costs in Southeast Asia, and concentrating domestic efforts to develop high value-added industrial chains.

At present, China is also facing the original Japanese problems: downward pressure on the economy, gradual slowdown in the export power of foreign trade, appreciation of RMB, high housing prices, serious financialization, sluggish domestic demand, and a trade war with the United States.

In order to ensure the stable and orderly development of the domestic economy, we have been trying to avoid the pit that Japan has gone through.

The first is to ensure a soft landing of the real estate industry.

At that time, the Japanese property market failed to make a soft landing, a hard landing, the bubble burst, and the assets of millions of people were blown up, which made the Japanese economy depressed for 30 years.

Therefore, stabilizing the property market, eliminating systemic financial risks and ensuring a soft landing of the real estate industry is one of the key tasks in 2022.

At present, it is mainly based on the demand of the property market in different cities. For example, Zhengzhou, as the capital of a big agricultural province, has a large population, but its industrial structure is not reasonable. In addition, the land supply in Zhengzhou was a bit large in previous years, which led to a high inventory in the property market and was hit by the 720 flood and epidemic several times. The city's economic downturn is serious, and the property market is risky. The state has given more help in various policies, and even launched the ultimate weapon of destocking-monetization shed reform in previous years.

Monetary shed reform is to give money directly to the relocated households, not to the resettlement houses, which is equivalent to artificially creating the demand for the property market.

For some first-and second-tier cities with less risks and solid economic fundamentals, we should focus on promoting the supply-side reform of the property market, such as increasing the construction of affordable housing, adjusting local auction rules, appropriately reducing the interest on financial loans, etc., and may even become a property tax pilot.

Financial easing, financial subsidies and other measures all point to one goal, that is, to fully stabilize the property market in the process of de-financialization.

Therefore, the financial transformation and relaxation of the property market in 2022 is inevitable. The general idea is to squeeze the bubble in the property market down, collapse wherever it is squeezed and stabilize it. This is destined that this year's property market regulation policy will continue to be differentiated, and it will be more intensive, accurate and efficient.

The second is to increase investment in new infrastructure.

Historically, when the two major economic growth kinetic energy of real estate investment and export slowed down, there was almost no energy consumption in the short term, mainly because infrastructure investment played a supporting role.

Old infrastructure, such as airports, railways and highways. , which corresponds to the physical space of people and logistics, is a carrier built to promote close communication between regions, accelerate the process of urbanization and accelerate the rapid gathering of people, goods and resources.

New infrastructure, such as 5G, data center, Beidou, Oriental Digital Western Computing, UHV, artificial intelligence, etc. Corresponding to information flow and capital flow, it aims to promote the cross-regional flow of virtual space carriers such as funds, information, electricity and data.

In the past, the old infrastructure was used to promote economic growth by issuing local bonds-the old infrastructure such as Gong Ji, subway and garden enhanced the land value and facilitated people's transactions and interactions-developers borrowed land at high prices-residents borrowed money to buy houses-and land transfer fees and taxes related to real estate transactions repaid local debts.

In this closed-loop chain to promote economic development, there are three debt links: local bonds are issued to engage in old infrastructure, developers borrow money to take land, and residents borrow money to buy houses. Therefore, it is the accumulation of debt that pushes up the economic development!

Now, local debt is high, developers are crazy about scale and high leverage, and the housing sector is also overwhelmed by mortgage loans. So this model is unsustainable and must be adjusted.

At present, the first link is the new infrastructure!

So why can the new infrastructure get rid of the debt-driven model of the old infrastructure?

First of all, the sources of new infrastructure resources are more extensive: some places participate in issuing bonds, but the amount is small, and more enterprises related to new infrastructure directly raise funds from the capital market. This is the significance of the stock market registration system. The capital market will be standardized, open and transparent as soon as possible, and enterprises will directly finance construction at low cost. There is also the support of the central bank's carbon emission reduction tools, which is to accurately export high-quality funds.

The source of money has been solved, and then there is the profit of enterprise operation, which is related to our "UHV" and "East calculation and West calculation".

For example, the investment scale of UHV is large and the upstream and downstream industrial chains are long, which are the main characteristics of UHV industry. This is similar to the real estate industry and has many characteristics of upstream and downstream industries.

Moreover, the central and eastern parts of China consume a lot of electricity, and 5.2% of the eastern coastal area contributes 40% of the country's GDP, but the exploitable energy here only accounts for 0.4% of the country's total.

Most of China's wind energy is in Inner Mongolia, most of its hydropower resources are in the southwest, and most of its solar energy is in the northwest. Like Sichuan province, hydropower generation is very large; Guangdong, a typical manufacturing province, is particularly short of energy. This geographical imbalance and mismatch has promoted the construction of the "power transmission from west to east" project, which is conducive to improving the comprehensive utilization efficiency and protecting the ecological environment.

As a result, the mismatch between supply and demand of power resources has been solved, domestic production efficiency has been greatly improved, and economic growth has been guaranteed.

In this way, with the foundation of local tax and the gradual landing of real estate tax, we can gradually get rid of the dependence on land finance.

The capital market will increasingly attract long-term and high-quality incremental funds, and high-tech specialized enterprises will also have the money to do research and development, and finally achieve scientific and technological breakthroughs, new economic impetus will be born, and a new round of development dividends will come.

People's employment, income, consumption and so on will form a positive cycle step by step.

This is the long-term significance of new infrastructure, so it is also the main investment port and outlet of the country in 2022.

The same is true for the Belt and Road construction not only at home but also abroad, which is the way out for China to earn huge foreign exchange under the strong export. Through investment development, we will promote the deep interaction between people, things, resources, information flow and capital flow between countries.

Third, finance will continue to stimulate the economy, and the effect will be greater than credit supply.

The specific difference between financial power and credit power is that direct tax reduction will help you pay less and increase your deposit balance.

The other is to give you investment and development through loans. Although there is more money in hand, the debt of the loan also increases, that is, the balance sheet of the enterprise expands greatly and the debt pressure continues to increase, which is obviously inconsistent with the tone of our deleveraging development.

As we all know, the prices of raw materials and energy have soared, and these resources are mainly controlled by overseas capital such as Europe, America or Japan. Although China's export trade is very strong, most of its profits are taken away by these upstream capitals, while the profits of domestic enterprises are very thin. Coupled with the appreciation of the renminbi, some enterprises have to lose money.

Therefore, the state took many measures last year to try its best to depress the RMB exchange rate in order to keep the meager profits of these export enterprises.

Small and medium-sized enterprises are reluctant to borrow money to expand production because of the thin profits and the epidemic situation. For example, if the loan interest is 4% and the profit of enterprise loan is only 3%, the interest of 1% will be lost when the bank loan is repaid.

In the past two days, the news that the central bank turned over 1 trillion profits to the central finance has been screened. This trillion yuan is mainly used by finance to retain tax rebates and increase transfer payments to local governments.

This transfer payment can directly reduce the debt of local governments, which is equivalent to the central government directly allocating funds to local governments. Local governments can use it to repay debts or invest in infrastructure projects without continuing to issue bonds for economic development. The tax refund directly becomes the deposit in the accounts of enterprises and individuals. These two items are equivalent to the reduction of the balance sheet and debt of the whole market.

Some people think that this is a bit like the US Treasury borrowing money from the Federal Reserve to send money directly to individuals, fearing that it will cause inflation. In fact, this is completely different, so don't worry at all. Because in the United States, it is the state that raises the debt ceiling, increases debt and expands the table, and prints money to the people. The central bank under our national system is profitable by operation, which is the real asset income of our country. It was originally the money earned by the market, not the money printed in a bottomless pit.

Finally, because our economic development needs continuous deleveraging, the subsequent financial efforts may continue to increase, because the secondary distribution of social wealth through fiscal taxation is an important means for us to achieve prosperity, and the middle-income population accounts for the majority of the population, so that domestic consumption capacity will be improved, internal circulation will be started, and the situation of national economic downturn and overcapacity will be solved.

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