Yet just because Mr Paulson has stumbled badly in recent months does not mean that China is on the right track. Zhou Xioachuan is wrong to urge a higher savings rate in the US. The US consumer is in full retreat; were the retreat to become a rout, China's factories would be among the first to be ruined. To commandeer Saint Augustine's prayer: “Give us global rebalancing – but not yet.”
If the US has overconsumed, China suffers from the opposite malaise. The savings rate is close to 60 per cent of gross domestic product, and Chinese policy has centred on producing cheap products to sell to the US on credit. This cannot continue forever. China's citizens deserve to enjoy more of the fruits of their labour, which means spending more and saving less. China's concrete-pouring fiscal stimulus is unlikely to help. It should be handing cash to its own citizens and spending more on health, education and social security. China's citizens save because they fear nobody will look after them in bad times – and bad times are coming.
A quick way to encourage domestic spending would be for China to allow the renminbi to appreciate. Until this summer, China had been doing that carefully. The appreciation has now stopped and last week the renminbi experienced its largest one-day fall against the dollar. Nobody should be surprised: China warned in October that this change in policy was on the cards. But it cannot be right for a country with such a huge surplus to resort to competitive devaluation. China's main defence, for now, is that the renminbi is still appreciating against a trade-weighted basket of currencies. But if the dollar falls, the renminbi must not try to overtake it on the way down.