Michael Pettis Profile picture
Jan 20 7 tweets 2 min read Read on X
1/7
Good Martin Wolf piece on the global return of mercantilism. What is new about this piece is that it seems part of a growing recognition among global opinion makers that mercantilism and trade war didn't start when deficit economies with...
ft.com/content/cd68b3…
2/7
open external accounts began to implement trade restrictions and otherwise control their external accounts. It started earlier, when economies that controlled their external accounts implemented trade and industrial policies that led to beggar-thy-neighbor trade surpluses.
3/7
We are returning, in other words, to Joan Robinson and her 1937 explanation of how trade conflict emerges. What I would add is that in a hyperglobalized trading system (i.e one in which transportation costs, communications costs, and the costs of...
ia802806.us.archive.org/16/items/essay…
4/7
transmitting capital have all fallen close to zero), you can have a stable system only when all major economies choose high levels of global integration or when all major economies choose high levels of economic sovereignty (to use Dani Rodrik's framing).
5/7
When some major economies choose the former, however, and others the latter, the system cannot be stable. That's because those that choose high levels of economic sovereignty are able to control both their internal accounts and their external accounts.
6/7
This means that they also control the external accounts of their trade partners, and, because every country's external account must be consistent with its internal account, the internal accounts of the latter must adjust to the policies of the former.
foreignaffairs.com/united-states/…
7/7
In a world in which some economies choose economic sovereignty and others choose global integration, in other words, the former can implement industrial policies that also become the industrial policies of the latter. This is never sustainable.
carnegieendowment.org/china-financia…

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More from @michaelxpettis

Feb 4
1/8
Jason Furman: "A weaker dollar may improve the economy’s long-run balance, but it does so by forcing Americans to cut back on spending. That is like telling children to eat more spinach today so they will be healthier in the future."
nytimes.com/2026/02/03/opi…
2/8
Furman is right. Currency appreciation reduces consumption costs in the short term by making imports cheaper, but in a hyperglobalized world, it also undermines domestic manufacturers by making them less competitive against foreign manufacturers.
3/8
Academic economists (mainly in the US) will argue that this is a good thing because the goal should be to maximize consumption, but the only sustainable way to maximize consumption over the longer term is to maximize production.
ft.com/content/89110b…
Read 8 tweets
Feb 3
1/4
Yicai: "China's macro leverage ratio – a measure of total debt relative to nominal GDP – rose by 11.8 percentage points to 302.3 percent in 2025, exceeding the 10.1 point increase recorded in 2024, according to a new research report by CASS.
yicaiglobal.com/news/chinas-de…
2/4
There is a lot of disagreement about the real debt-to-GDP ratio in China, especially given the difficulty of counting hidden debt, along with an "abnormal" rise in payables and receivables that reflects inability to pay debt more than it reflects rising revenues.
3/4
If we use the official total social finance number as the measure of debt, the ratio is 315%. The BIS and other entities show even higher ratios. But whatever the real number, it is among the highest in the world, perhaps exceeded only by Japan among major economies.
Read 4 tweets
Feb 2
1/7
SCMP: "Chinese scholars have called for greater urgency in reducing reliance on US dollar assets, particularly after Washington and its allies froze about US$300 billion in Russian foreign exchange reserves in 2022."
scmp.com/economy/global…
2/7
Although this may be a favorite new topic among academics – and not just Chinese academics - few seem to understand that a country cannot restructure global capital flows without also restructuring global...
3/7
trade flows, nor that a country cannot change its external imbalances without either changing its internal imbalances or changing the external imbalances (and thus the internal imbalances) of its trade partners.
Read 7 tweets
Jan 22
1/12
This talk about Europe's ability to wield its holdings of US Treasuries as a political tool is as divorced from reality as the talk about China's ability to wield its holdings of US Treasuries as a political tool.
via @ftft.com/content/7d6436…
2/12
For all the huffing and puffing, Chinese holdings of US assets actually increased. This shouldn't have been a surprise. If you run massive trade surpluses, you have no choice but to acquire foreign assets, and if you won't acquire the alternatives, you must buy US assets.
3/12
These analysts seem to forget that you cannot change your capital account without also changing your trade account, and that you cannot change your external imbalances without also changing your internal imbalances.
Read 12 tweets
Jan 21
1/7
EU commissioner for trade Maroš Šefčovič is absolutely right to question the usefulness of the WTO: "If the WTO is to meet today’s challenges, its rules must be fair and deliver balanced, legitimate outcomes. Currently, they do neither."
ft.com/content/2ff1d4…
2/7
The fact that decades of the largest, persistent trade imbalances in history have largely been WTO compliant suggests strongly that the WTO is more about maintaining legal fictions than it is about discouraging the adverse impact of trade intervention on the global economy.
3/7
As Keynes (and many others) pointed out nearly a century ago, evidence that a country is intervening in trade shows up very clearly in the form of persistent, beggar-thy-neighbor trade surpluses. If the latter exists, then the former exists.
Read 7 tweets
Jan 21
1/6
Reuters: "Chinese leaders have pledged to "significantly" lift household consumption’s share of the economy over the next five years, but have not given a specific target."
reuters.com/world/asia-pac…
2/6
If we assume that Beijing hopes to raise the consumption share of GDP by 3-5 percentage points (roughly a third of what it would need to be a more "normal" low-consuming economy), consumption would have to grow by 1-2 percentage points faster than GDP over the period.
3/6
That's a pretty big gap, and one we have never yet seen in the past 3-4 decades of Chinese growth. The good way to manage this, of course, would be for consumption growth to accelerate, although it is not at all clear what would cause that acceleration.
Read 6 tweets

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