Free exchange An unbalanced debate

摘要

IN 2005 BEN BERNANKE, then a governor of America's Federal Reserve, noted a "remarkable reversal in the flows of credit" to several emerging economies, especially those in East Asia. These countries had begun to save more than they invested at home, becoming a "net supplier of funds" to the rest of the world. Their "saving glut", as Mr Bernanke called it, was helping finance America's widening current-account deficit, allowing the world's richest country to buy more goods and services from others than it sold to them. Mr Bernanke wondered whether this arrangement could, or should, persist. Some economists later blamed the glut for America's housing bubble. Similar concerns are resurfacing. In the second quarter of this year, America's net national saving rate dipped below zero, as Stephen Roach of Yale University pointed out in the Financial Times last month. Lacking saving of its own, America instead borrowed "surplus saving from abroad", he wrote. Its current-account deficit widened faster in the second quarter than ever before recorded.