1/7
I am not an expert on the French economy, Rémi, but I don't think France has been running persistent deficits for the past 10-15 years because of its US-style role in absorbing excess foreign savings. I think that is more of a problem for the Anglophone financial systems.
2/7
I think the reason for its persistent deficits is its refusal to play the German game of increasing international competitiveness by lowering wages relative to productivity, perhaps because it is politically too difficult for France to do so.
3/7
As I see it, Germany (along with other persistent surplus countries) is competitive internationally, and so runs surpluses, mainly because its workers are paid less relative to their production than the workers of its trade partners (including most of Europe).
4/7
If I'm right, one solution for France would be for it to become more "competitive", like Germany, by lowering its wages. Doing so will resolve its persistent deficits, but at the cost of higher domestic income inequality and a reduced French contribution to global demand.
5/7
This by the way makes the global problem worse, because lower wages in any advanced economy means downward pressure on global demand, and forces the rest of the world to choose either more unemployment or more household debt.
6/7
The other solution is for Germany (and other persistent surplus countries) to push relative wages back to where they were before 2003, and balance the resulting reduction in international competitiveness by boosting domestic demand, perhaps through infrastructure investment.
7/7
This would be good not just for France, but for the global economy and even for Germany.

I apologize for my ignorance of the details of the French economy, but does this sound like a reasonable description of the French problem?

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More from @michaelxpettis

21 Nov
1/9
One of the problems I have with discussions by the IMF and the World Bank – and indeed by most economists – about China's economic prospects is that while by now nearly everyone agrees that Chinese growth includes many years...
imf.org/en/News/Articl…
2/9
of "inflated" – or "low quality" – growth, driven by wasted investment in non-productive property and infrastructure, there seems to be no recognition of the future cost of this inflated growth.
3/9
The conclusion is always that if Beijing implements the right reforms, while growth will slow a little, it will be high-quality and sustainable. This seems to assume that there will be no adverse consequence or difficult adjustment costs for growth in the future.
Read 9 tweets
21 Nov
1/6
I read the very-interesting McKinsey report to which this article refers. Much of the world's "wealth", as McKinsey measures it, consists of the value of real estate, and given China's real estate bubble, which has driven its value...
news.yahoo.com/report-china-n… via @YahooNews
2/6
to more than twice that of the US and more than three times that of Europe, it perhaps isn't surprising that Chinese "wealth" now exceeds that of any other country.
mckinsey.com/industries/fin…
3/6
Perhaps it will come as no surprise that the last time a country's total wealth exceeded that of the US was in Japan around 1990. It's share of global GDP at the time was roughly the same as China's today, and it was experiencing an even greater real estate bubble.
Read 6 tweets
19 Nov
1/17
In this very interesting paper @Furno_Francesco compares the Kennedy corporate tax cuts in the early 1960s with the recent Trump corporate tax cuts, and finds that the former stimulated output roughly four times more than the latter.

ffurno.github.io/JMP_Corporate_…
2/17
Put differently, the Kennedy tax cuts seem to have increased business investment while the Trump tax cuts were mostly passed on to shareholders which, as Atif Mian, Ludwig Straub and Amir Sufi have explained elsewhere, was likely in turn to lead to higher household debt.
3/17
Furno explains that “A large part of this difference can be attributed to differences in pre-reform tax depreciation policy.”
scholar.harvard.edu/files/straub/f…
Read 19 tweets
18 Nov
@gonglei89 1/4
The growth in the debt-to-GDP ratio did slow after 2015, partly because the regulators were able to squeeze out especially egregious forms of debt creation and partly because stricter regulations resulted in some debt creation moving off the balance sheet.
@gonglei89 2/4
Beijing however did not get debt under control, or even come close. After 2015 (even excluding 2020), official measures of debt continued to grow more than 1.2 times the GDP growth rate.
@gonglei89 3/4
Given how high the debt ratio has reached by now, this means that the increase in debt each year (still excluding 2020) is the equivalent of more than an astonishing 25% of that year's GDP (or 31% if we use your numbers rather than the PBoC numbers).
Read 4 tweets
17 Nov
1/7
In May 2016 the SCMP wrote excitedly about a major new policy piece in the People's Daily by an "authoritative" figure (which in PD-speak means someone extremely senior).
scmp.com/news/china/eco… via @scmpnews
2/7
"A People’s Daily article published yesterday," it said, "showed that China’s leadership is trying to make a grand shift in the nation’s economic policies in a bid to say goodbye to debt ­fuelled growth. In a sign of distaste for the credit-pumped growth in the past...
3/7
couple of months, the Communist Party mouthpiece cited an unidentified 'authoritative' figure as saying that boosting growth by increasing leverage was like 'growing a tree in the air', and that a high leverage ratio could lead to a financial crisis."
Read 7 tweets
16 Nov
1/6
There are two very different types of “wasted” infrastructure spending by the government, and each has a different impact on the overall economy. One kind of waste consists of spending $110 of resources and labor to produce...

wsj.com/articles/who-w… via @WSJOpinion
2/6
something that raises economic productivity by $100. In that case the country is poorer overall by $10.

Another very different kind of waste consists of spending $90 of resources and labor and $20 in bureaucratic costs (including graft) to produce something...
3/6
that raises economic productivity by $100. In that case the country is still richer by $10, but there has also been a $20 transfer within the country from one sector of the economy to another.
Read 6 tweets

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