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Data on Chinese M1 increase in 2010

Data on Chinese M1 Increase in 2010. Created by Sal Khan.

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  • leaf green style avatar for user Spundun Bhatt
    What does M1 stand for? M1 money supply as opposed to what other money supply?
    (10 votes)
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    • blobby green style avatar for user theholts4
      M0 is actual money that you could use to go and buy stuff.

      M1 is M0 + demand deposits, basicly ckecking accounts in the bank that store your money where you can get your money anytime you need it (see Banking and Money playlist).

      M2 is M1 + deposits where you can get your money within 3 months + deposits where you will get your money within 2 years.

      M3 is M2 + bonds that reach maturity within 2 years.

      The M in all, I think, stands for money.
      (24 votes)
  • leaf green style avatar for user Tarek Seif El Nasr
    Why are the Chinese printing too much money will that not cause inflation?
    (4 votes)
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  • blobby green style avatar for user Nick Ross
    The lesson uses the November 2009 and November 2010 M1 measures to show us the staggering increase in money supply- roughly $722 BILLION!! Is this huge increase typical or is it a "fluke" stemming from the Chinese stimulus in response to the worldwide economic downturn that began in 2008?
    (3 votes)
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    • blobby green style avatar for user SlowFireflow
      Honestly, it might be a fluke but I think Khan is using this as statistical evidence for his case on the previous videos in this series. I'm not sure if you watched the previous videos in this series but Khan's point is that China is creating Yuan currency to keep a trade imbalance. The reason for this is so America continues to have a high demand for Chinese goods. China keeps their goods at a low cost artificially by introducing/creating new currency. Khan, is saying this data is evidence for his point. China posts these statistics online, it might be worth checking out if you think 2008 was related to all the extra money. I believe Khan wouldn't use this data if he didn't have confidence in it, I believe he really wants to get his facts right and wouldn't use questionable data.
      (7 votes)
  • leaf green style avatar for user rwrae72
    If they increase the money supply (M1) to buy dollars, does the amount used to buy dollars then come out of the M1 figure?
    (3 votes)
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    • mr pants teal style avatar for user Wrath Of Academy
      Well I think it would be better to say China's bank increases M0, and as a consequence M1 rises. If the new M1 is converted to another currency though, there has to be someone on the other side paying dollars to buy Yuan. So someone that used to own dollars now owns the new Yuan, so they don't disappear from M1. The new Yuan are still in a bank somewhere, or turned into paper.
      (3 votes)
  • leaf green style avatar for user Zaphod Beeblebrox
    So when people talk about China having some $3 trillion in reserves, they are talking about foreign exchange reserves and they are counting the amount of bonds they hold not actual foreign currency?

    So in the case of USD reserves they hold, are they talking about bonds or simply USD? Does anyone know?
    (2 votes)
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  • aqualine seed style avatar for user K B
    Why M1 money is taken into account when actual money printed by central bank is described by M0 money?
    (2 votes)
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  • male robot hal style avatar for user Benjamite
    Why does Sal calculate the increase in M1?
    Does'nt the increase in currecy (M0) give a more accurate picture as that is what the PBC is printing and that is what is exchanged for dollars?
    (1 vote)
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Video transcript

We've talked a good bit about how the Chinese government is printing yuan to buy a foreign exchange to keep the yuan devalued. But what I want to do in this video is actually look at the data and show you that I wasn't making all of that stuff up. So this is actually data from the People's Bank of China. This is directly from their website. And right over here, this is the 2010 money supply. This is the 2009 money supply. You can get any money supply, any year that you want, from their site. And what we could do is just look at what happened over just even 2010, or from a same point in '09 to '10. Let me take November '09 to November '10, and I'll look at their M1 money supply. I'll look at their M1 money supply. I'm going from November to November because we'll see some of the other charts, we actually have data for there. We don't have December to December for some of the other charts I'm going to use in this video. But it just gives the general idea. If you go from November of 2009, the M1 money supply, now this is in hundred million yuan. So there was a 212,493 hundred million yuan. And we'll try to convert these into numbers that make a little bit more sense. And then you fast forward to November of 2010, the M1 is 259,420 hundred million yuan. So if we-- let's get a calculator out and actually make some sense of that. So a year later, it's at 259,420 and from that let's subtract what it was before, 212,493. So the difference is 46,927. Now this is in hundred million yuan. So if you wanted it in million yuan, you want to multiply by 100. I think it's pronounced "you-wen" or "you-won." I'm not a Chinese pronunciation expert. This is in millions of yuan. And now if we wanted it in billions we can divide this by 1,000. So let's divide this by 1,000. So it's roughly 4.6, 4.7 trillion yuan increase in their M1 money supply from November, 2009 to November, 2010. Sort of a pretty dramatic increase. And just so you could put this in the scope of dollars I'll use a rough approximation for the current exchange rate, 6.5 yuan per dollar. So let me just divide that by 6.5 to get a rough approximation for what that would be in dollars. And we get $721-- remember this was in billions-- so we're actually $722 billion expansion in the M1 money supply of China from November, 2009 to November, 2010. In the next video, we're going to see how this compares to the actual increase in foreign exchange, or actually foreign assets. And we can see how much of this was actually just to go and go buy things from other countries, or buy foreign exchange from other current countries, and essentially to keep the Chinese yuan devalued. This is Salman Khan of the Khan Academy for CNBC.