They came; they saw; they lost. That is the reaction to what emerged on global rebalancing at the summit meeting of the Group of 20 leading countries in Seoul last week. Publicly, surplus countries persist in calling on those in deficit to deflate themselves into economic health. The consequences of this folly are now evident in the eurozone. At the world level, the US will never accept it. But, beneath the radar, something more productive may be emerging.
This more optimistic perspective can be drawn from the texts of the leaders’ declaration. This states that “persistently large imbalances, assessed against indicative guidelines to be agreed by our finance ministers and central bank governors, warrant an assessment of their nature and the root causes of impediments to adjustment . . . These indicative guidelines composed of a range of indicators would serve as a mechanism to facilitate timely identification of large imbalances that require preventive and corrective actions.” Ugly, but sensible. Together with the talk of the need for surplus countries to rely more on domestic demand, of enhanced surveillance by the International Monetary Fund and of exchange rates, a somewhat stronger mandate may have emerged.
In public, of course, debate has focused on the sins of quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve, with China and Germany voluble in condemnation. Why such modest monetary easing, in the context of a weak US economy and stagnant monetary growth, has caused such hysteria is hard to understand.