Posted on 09/25/2009 8:11:09 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
China: More Trade Tensions 2 comments
by: Michael Pettis September 25, 2009 | about: FXI / PSJ
While the G20 leaders make reassuring noises about international trade, I think the risk of rising trade tensions have not abated at all. As I see it, everything depends on whether or not domestic Chinese polices had any role in creating the global imbalances, and if they did, then we are still in the early stages of a difficult process of assigning the costs of the global adjustment through trade.
Beijing hates when anyone suggests that Chinese policies were partly at fault for the current global imbalances, and doesn’t even like people to use the phrase “global imbalances,” but like it or not, we have to figure out whether in fact Chinese policies mattered. As I see it, China’s consumption rate, the lowest ever recorded, and it’s trade surplus, the largest as a share of global GDP ever recorded, could not help but have been caused by policies – such as an undervalued currency regime, excessively low interest rates, sluggish wage growth, unraveling social safety nets, and manufacturing subsidies – that were almost wholly under domestic control.
According to my understanding of Chinese growth, it was policies that systematically forced households implicitly and explicitly to subsidize often-otherwise-unprofitable investment and manufacturing that led to wide and divergent growth rates between production and consumption, and of course the gap between the two is the savings rate. If that is true, the stimulus package is only likely to exacerbate the domestic imbalance.
This matters because as the US begins the too-slow but irresistible process of raising its savings rate, something else must change too.
(Excerpt) Read more at seekingalpha.com ...
Ping!
We need a real president. The current clown-in-chief is clueless.
To all boomer liberals: your waning years on earth will not be what you dreamed of, when you were flower children in 60's.
TLR, excellent article from @....the Chinese economy is between a rock & a hard place, IMO.
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