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

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
Jan 18
1/6
Wall Street bankers and owners of movable capital would hate it, but if the rest of the world were to reduce its dependence on the US dollar, this would be good for the US economy, good for US manufacturing, and good for US farmers and workers.
wsj.com/finance/curren…
2/6
The claim that the US benefits from the global use of the dollar is one of those things that people believe even though they can't explain why – except perhaps in terms of sanctions. None of the world's fastest-growing economies (including...
foreignaffairs.com/united-states/…
3/6
advanced economies like the US in the 100 years before the 1970s, Germany in the same time period, or post-war Japan, Taiwan and South Korea) had major reserve currency status, and yet they all had rapidly growing economies driven by even more rapid growth in manufacturing.
Read 6 tweets
Jan 18
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.
Read 4 tweets
Jan 18
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.
Read 10 tweets
Jan 15
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.
Read 4 tweets

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