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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1/4 Bloomberg: "“Even with strong determination and sufficient resources, transforming China’s economy into one driven by consumption and services will take years,” Goldman said. “With a more reluctant, measured approach, it could take decades.”" bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
2/4 Goldman is right, of course, unless a debt crisis, or a serious acceleration of trade war, forces a much faster, disruptive adjustment. While the latter might happen, the former is, for now at least, pretty unlikely.
3/4 A long adjustment, however, means a Japanese-style adjustment over two or three decades, in which consumption growth continues at more or less the same pace it had in the past while GDP growth drops sharply, and investment growth goes negative.
1/10
SCMP: "Kenya has reached a preliminary trade deal with China for duty-free exports of key products including coffee, tea and cut flowers – a major step towards narrowing the East African nation’s long-standing trade gap with Beijing."
via @scmpnewssc.mp/gg0zg?utm_sour…
2/10
This kind of incrementalist thinking is one of the reasons why global trade is so unbalanced and so poorly understood. China does not run a trade surplus with Kenya because of tariffs on coffee, tea and cut flowers.
3/10
It runs a massive trade surplus with the world because of equally-massive domestic imbalances. Reducing tariffs on Kenyan coffee, tea and cut flowers will have almost no effect at all on China's domestic imbalances, and so no affect on China's need for a trade surplus.
1/4 Aggregate financing in China, the most widely-used proxy for total debt, ended 2025 at RMB 442.12 trillion, an 8.3% increase over last year's outstanding amount. This is a relatively small increase in total debt compared to earlier years. english.news.cn/20260115/3e5af…
2/4 But of course nominal GDP growth is also much lower, so the RMB 35.6 trillion increase in aggregate financing in 2025 represents a 12 percentage-point increase in China's debt-to-GDP ratio. This is higher than the 11 percentage-point increases in 2024 and 2023.
3/4 China's debt data isn't always comparable over time, but I think only the COVID year of 2020 saw a higher increase in China's debt-to-GDP ratio, and because this was partially reversed in 2021, the average annual increase over the two years was only ten percentage points.
1/5 NYT: "The U.S. trade deficit in goods and services shrank to $29.4 billion in October, down from $48.1 billion the prior month. The figure was the lowest monthly trade deficit recorded since June 2009." nytimes.com/2026/01/08/bus…
2/5 If this persists, it may be the most important factor for those thinking about what is likely to happen in 2026. In a three-month period during which the Chinese trade surplus has surged, the US trade deficit has declined.
3/5 Simple arithmetic tells us that the difference must be reflected in the trade balances of other countries. Some of this will have showed up initially as rising trade deficits among developing countries, but this will ultimately be limited by their abilities to finance them.
1/8 Very interesting CNA article on Beijing's strategic pivot towards upgrading the quality of China's existing housing stock. It turns out that much of its housing stock, including much that was built in recent years, is of unacceptable quality. channelnewsasia.com/east-asia/chin…
2/8 CNA: "“This strategic pivot to ‘good housing’ is fundamentally about rebalancing the economy – shifting from speculative inventory to quality living,” Lin Han-Shen, China country director at The Asia Group, told CNA. “Restoring household confidence is central".
3/8 The article also cites the Conference Board’s Zhang Yuhan who warned that "the shift towards higher-quality housing is “likely to support confidence gradually”, but cautioned it does not resolve oversupply or developer liquidity pressures on its own."
1/6 People often say that the problem with the global trading system is mainland China, but that's not true. Taiwan, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Switzerland, Singapore and many others have run similar positions. The problem is with the global trading system itself.
2/6 As long as countries like the US (and the EU soon?) continue to accommodate global saving imbalances, our current trading system allows for a kind of Kalecki paradox in which individual economies can be rewarded for behavior that undermines growth in the system as a whole.
3/6 Keynes explained this in 1944: economies that repress domestic demand in order to subsidize their manufacturing reduce overall global demand, but are able nonetheless to grow more quickly by taking a larger share of other countries' demand.