Global imbalances: out with a bang?

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama – The simplest way to end the imbalances in the world’s economy is also sadly perhaps the most likely: for the Chinese to stop buying US debt.

This is not going to happen anytime soon, for one thing deleveraging in the US will for a time make US Treasuries look good value, but a buyer’s strike is a heck of a lot more likely than the orchestrated rebalancing the US will push at this week’s G-20 meeting of leading nations.The US plans to advance a plan at the Pittsburgh summit to fundamentally change the balance of the global economy, which over the past 15 years or so has been characterised by over-borrowing and consumption in the West provided and financed by savers and workers in Asia.That state of play kept going, as is the way of these things, until it stopped, or rather until one of its wheels fell off. It wasn’t that Asians stopped saving or buying US debt but that speculators, usually in Europe, stopped buying securities, often minted in London, which were being created to front run the flow of capital from Asia to the west.That popped the asset price bubble and the flow of finance to consumers in the US who, with much gnashing of teeth, began to save again and consume more guardedly.But the debt bubble hasn’t really popped, it has only shifted shape. Before we had private debts which only could be repaid if assets, mostly real estate, continued to go up in value. Now, a new wave of public borrowing is cushioning the downturn. Asians buy some of the debt and some of the money raised buys goods from Asia.Theoretically, China and other investors in US Treasuries buy them because they believe that the US will ultimately tax more, spend less and make good. In reality, it is more vendor financing and a good money after bad attempt to protect earlier investments.The US points out, in a letter to its G20 partners, that if the savings rises in the deficit countries persist and there is no rise in consumption in the savings-bloc, global economic growth will be poor. The idea, it seems, is for IMF-led international coordination to, on the one hand, jawbone the borrowers so they remain credible while at the same time somehow inducing the savers to allow their currencies to appreciate and induce their citizens to spend.A new study of global imbalances by economists at the Bank of England points out that Asian savers will only carry on buying western debt so long as they believe it to be high quality.’In the short run, increased supply of government bonds resulting from the expansionary fiscal policies pursued in deficit countries has provided an ongoing source of asset supply to meet the investment demand from surplus countries,’ according to the Bank of England.’However, to the extent that savers in surplus countries may become more reluctant over time to invest funds in deficit-country government bonds this would tend to raise the cost of borrowing in deficit countries. This shift in the relative cost of borrowing could be an important part of the process by which a rebalancing of demand from deficit to surplus countries is achieved over the medium term.’In other words, if Asian savers lose faith in Treasuries or gilts, they will stop buying, causing interest rates to spike. This would cause demand to be rebalanced, all right, but mostly by suppressing it in the US and other highly indebted countries like Britain.This kind of loss of faith in markets can be very sudden. You could draw a parallel to the way in which investors in securitised debt lost faith in the value of a AAA rating, except this time the loss of faith will be in sovereign borrowers and we really will not be able to blame the ratings agencies as enablers.China and other exporters of course have good reason to want to avoid this. They are stuck with trillions of dollars in Treasuries and they certainly don’t want to kill the US goose while it is still more profitable to sell it goose food.There may also come a time when the world’s savers calculate that they can earn more by investing at home.Essentially much of what a controlled rebalancing would do – weaken the dollar and build opportunity for domestic-oriented investment in Asia – creates incentives for a rapid reallocation out of Treasuries.Ultimately the rebalancing must happen. The US for very good reasons wants this to happen little by little, but it does not have to happen that way. Past attempts at a controlled rebalancing have failed and it is hard to see what will make this one different.- Nampa-Reuters