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发表于 2004-12-27 11:02:08| 字数 4,434| - 中国–北京–北京 光环迅通
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Andy Kessler. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.:
Dec 23, 2004. pg. A.10
You want a scapegoat for the dollar's almost daily decline -- the
Chinese water torture on the U.S. economy? I blame Steve Jobs. Apple is the
worst offender in the decline of U.S. manufacturing. Their engineers sit
around in air-conditioned offices on streets with cutesy names like Infinite
Loop in Cupertino, Calif., and have others make stuff for them. They
imported two million iPods assembled by thousands of Chinese workers just
last quarter -- an almost $1.5 billion annualized trade deficit in iPods
alone.
Those in D.C. who can do something about this -- former railroaders
and breakfast cereal moguls, are so worried about trade deficits that they
refuse to defend the greenback, even begging China to unpeg the yuan from
the dollar so we can decline against it as well. We're in a place called
Vertigo. Economists weep that foreigners will no longer fund our spending
and that America surely has peaked. The dollar is destined to the depths of
despair until it drops so low that we get those manufacturing jobs back.
Gee, thanks Steve Jobs.
I checked my wallet and realized that I own dollars, including my bank
account, house and stocks. Lowering them in value hurts every American. I
was in such a funk thinking about all this that I played my own infinite
loop of Muddy Waters on my appropriately blue iPod mini. I happened to turn
it over and read the fine print. Sure enough -- "Assembled in China." But it
also says "Designed by Apple in California." In the middle of the song
"Trouble No More," it all started making sense.
Over the last year, two things have happened. First, Apple has
increased sales by over a third, almost all from iPods -- those two million
of them at $265 each last quarter and 100 million songs sold via their
iTunes service. An iPod is just the combination of some Apple software,
cheap disk drives and a $12 chip from a Silicon Valley company named
PortalPlayer. I calculated that Apple pays $200 per iPod to Chinese
assembler Inventec to slap it all together. Even with cheap labor, Inventec
has almost no profits, I'd bet under $10, probably more like $4.
PortalPlayer, by the way, e-mails its design to Taiwan to be fabricated,
with profits of $5 per chip.
The second change is that Apple's stock has gone from $21 to $64.
Pretty cool, capitalism at its best. Why? Because Apple keeps $65 per
iPod -- money chases profits! If you assume the stock-price increase is all
due to the iPod (it is), then that business is worth some $15 billion. Add
in PortalPlayer's market value of $1 billion and you get a feel for how the
world works. A $1.5 billion trade deficit increases wealth in the U.S. by
$16 billion. I'll take that trade any day. So will all the holders of the
retirement accounts who own Apple's stock. So, why am I caring about
deficits again? Trade deficits are an economic construct, and lowering the
dollar won't solve a thing. We are moving low-margin, low-pay jobs overseas,
but fortunately, are left with high-margin, high-pay intellectual-property
jobs. Would you rather own Apple making a margin of $65 or Invetec with $4,
on the same product? Me too. We may have trade deficits of $550 billion this
year, but we enjoy a huge margin surplus.
The very illogical way (so no one believes it) to get this all back in
balance is for the dollar to rise. A lower dollar means foreigners get a
needless discount on our productive stuff -- Pentiums and iPods, Windows XP
and Oracle databases, and Cisco routers. They have to buy them anyway to run
their economies (well, maybe not iPods) so why discount? Add non-productive
but life-enhancing intellectual property to complete the sweep -- drugs,
Hollywood movies, U2. A weak dollar won't bring back manufacturing jobs --
with $20/hour here vs. $2 in China, the dollar would have to drop 90%. And
why should we encourage low-paying jobs in this country?
Foreigners buy Treasury bonds -- they own 43% of them -- so we don't
have to. Who wants 3% returns? We should own stocks of the high-margin
companies that benefit from this design vs. manufacturing divide. As we move
to an intellectual-property economy, our wealth will come from exporting
profitable designs and importing more finished goods. Higher salaries and
our stock market balance this all out as those dollars flow back in. Of
course, bean counters can't find the money that flows into the stock market,
it is just bean dip. The $4-trillion-plus in trade deficits since 1976 has
been matched by an $11 trillion increase in value of our stock market.
That's about all you have to know. Plus, as Jack Nicholson might say, they
can't handle our dollars. Too many dollars in foreign central banks leads to
overlending to wasteful domestic companies. Japan is just emerging 15 years
later from a nonperforming-loan hangover. China is face-first in the punch
bowl with half its bank loans uncollectible: If their currency spikes, it
might go to 100%.
Rather than debase our wallets, Japan and China have to buy dollar
assets to keep their currencies from rising too much if they want to
continue to sell us their industrial output, while of course, we get rich
selling them the tools to do it productively. I'd suggest thanking Bono, er,
Steve Jobs, for the iPod economy. |
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