We’ve been at first amused but more recently alarmed at how “global imbalances” are becoming many people’s preferred explanation of the financial crisis. At first you could brush it off this way: “global imbalances (read: ‘blame China’) . . .” But this explanation is going mainstream, not least because it is always more convenient for policymakers and bad actors to blame someone far away. For example, Dealbook (New York Times) kicked off a roundtable on the causes of the financial crisis this way:
“There is a conventional view developing on the financial crisis. The Federal Reserve’s policy of historically low interest rates spurred a worldwide search for higher risk and return. Concurrently, the entrenched United States trade imbalance led to a huge transfer of dollar wealth to Asian and commodity-based countries. The unwillingness of Asian economies, particularly China, to stimulate their own domestic consumption led these countries to reinvest the proceeds into the United States. This further contributed to lower American interest rates and further fueled the search for return.”
(Mortgage securitization gets mentioned, but only in the fourth paragraph!)
Simon and I took this on in our Washington Post online column this week, but I thought it was interesting enough to repost here in full, below.
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The time is here for our nation to actually do something about the recent financial crisis — that is, do something to prevent it from happening again. But instead, many people are finding it easier to pass the buck than to, say, regulate the financial sector effectively.
The recent Group of 20 conference in Pittsburgh was replete with talk about “global imbalances,” which means — in the spirit of the “South Park” movie — “blame China!”
Continue reading “Imbalances, Schmalances” →