New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman writes about China’s accumulation of U.S. securities:
Two years ago, we lived in a world in which China could save much more than it invested and dispose of the excess savings in America. That world is gone.
Yet the day after his new-reserve-currency speech, Mr. Zhou gave another speech in which he seemed to assert that China’s extremely high savings rate is immutable, a result of Confucianism, which values “anti-extravagance.” Meanwhile, “it is not the right time” for the United States to save more. In other words, let’s go on as we were.
That’s also not going to happen.
The bottom line is that China hasn’t yet faced up to the wrenching changes that will be needed to deal with this global crisis. The same could, of course, be said of the Japanese, the Europeans — and us.
