Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
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The idea that trade imbalances are more likely to be the result of credit imbalances than of savings imbalances ignores the role of savings imbalances in creating credit imbalances. When a surplus country demands to be paid for its trade surplus with claims on American assets, the U.S. economy must adjust to create these assets—and one of the most common ways it does so is by expanding credit.
It is easy to assume that sovereign debt forgiveness involves a collective transfer of wealth from the creditor country to the debt-owing country, but this is only true under specific—and unrealistic—conditions. In today’s environment, sovereign debt forgiveness mainly represents a transfer within the creditor country. It benefits farmers and manufacturers in the creditor country at the expense of the country’s nonproductive savers.
There is a widespread belief that a country’s national debt burden is sustainable if the interest rate on its debt is less than its expected GDP growth rate. But, in fact, the relationship between interest rates and the GDP growth rate reveals more about the distribution of income in a country than about the sustainability of its debt.
It is a mistake to assume that there is a global capital and technology frontier toward which every country must strive to acquire development. Economic development requires, above all, the right set of formal and informal institutions.
U.S. households will likely respond to the shocks of the pandemic by increasing their savings rates, as will foreign households. If the U.S. government does not decisively increase spending, higher American household savings will force either American debt or unemployment to rise even more.