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Exploding the Myths About China’s Global Economic Role
wallstreetexaminer.com / by Alan Tonelson, Courtesy of RealityChek •
Since we’ve never had any contact, I can’t take any credit for Adair Turner’s outstanding new column that explodes lots of dangerous myths about China’s role in the world economy. Still, I feel entitled to be gratified that Turner, a former senior British finance official, has made many of the main points I’ve been laying out since my 2002 bookThe Race to the Bottom appeared.
One of Race‘s most important observations, in my opinion, concerned what you might call the real-economy roots of financial crises – in that case, the turmoil that convulsed East Asia and much of the rest of the developing world in the late 1990s. Whereas most analysts blamed the crisis almost entirely on lending and spending trends, largely in East Asia, that got way out of whack with economic fundamentals, I showed that these imbalances stemmed largely from trade trends and imbalances that became unsustainable.
China’s exports boomed so strongly, and Japan’s remained so robust, that even though the American market on which the entire region relied was growing nicely, newer trading powers like Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, and Thailand got squeezed out. And since the world’s other high income regions (Western Europe and Japan) were following export-led strategies themselves, the new Asian exporters had nowhere else to go. Investors quickly began withdrawing credit that they’d extended in the assumption that these countries’ trade profits would keep growing indefinitely. And each plunged into a long and painful recession, and the fallout spread throughout the developing world. China, however, escaped – mainly by quietly increasing various export subsidies and preserving its U.S. and global market share gains.
The post Exploding the Myths About China’s Global Economic Role appeared first on Silver For The People.
Source: http://silveristhenew.com/2015/02/16/exploding-the-myths-about-chinas-global-economic-role/
