Bueno y malo

Un post im-pres-cin-di-ble de Scott Sumner:
Habría que hacer unas "tablas de la ley" de este tipo:
- tener superávit no te hace más fuerte; ejemplo, Japón. (Además, es mercantilismo)
-tener un déficit no te debilita; ejemplo, Australia. (Depende de tener recursos para pagarlo regularmente)
- la inflación no siempre es mala. (Sobre todo cuando es muy baja o negativa). etc...
Al final, subrayo lo que dice del euro y de los PIIGS. Discrepo en una cosa: dice que el euro no es la causa del excedente de Alemania; pero sí lo es de nuestro déficit crónico. Entonces...

Exports don’t make one strong, as the Japanese have shown.  Subsidies don’t give one an advantage in trade.  Nor does the level of the euro (except perhaps in the short run, but that doesn’t explain Germany.)  Germany’s model doesn’t require other countries to run up lots of debt.  It’s certainly not a beggar-thy-neighbor model, indeed I don’t think such a thing exists.  Germany has no moral obligation to bail out the PIGS.  Export models aren’t debt models.  Even if every country in the world ran budget surpluses, places like Germany would still run trade surpluses.  Here’s a quote from a new piece I wrote for The Economist:

It makes sense for a fast growing economy to borrow against the future, as when Korea ran deficits during the 1970s and 1980s. Or take a developed country like Australia. It absorbs a large flow of immigrants, who may borrow to buy a house against their future income within Australia. Indeed some current account deficits don’t even represent borrowing, at least in the ordinary sense of the term. Consider the case where Australians buy cars from East Asia, and pay for the cars by selling vacation condos on the Gold Coast to wealthy Asians. In many respects this is ordinary trade, except that the products that are built with Australian labour (the condos) never leave the country.

Australia hasn’t had a recession since 1991, despite running large current account deficits for that entire period. The Australian deficits are neither undesirable, nor unsustainable. Australia has lots of land, and Asia has a huge emerging middle class to buy condos located on that land. And Australia has almost no national debt. So why are trade deficits viewed as such a problem?

Australian national debt has recently risen to about 20% of GDP, whereas Germany’s is closer to 80%.  Export powerhouse Japan is higher still.

The PIGS made several mistakes.  One was excessive public debt (except perhaps Spain.)  But Germany and America and Britain also have excessive public debt.  The other mistake was in joining the euro.  That combination proved deadly.  But the euro isn’t responsible for Germany’s surplus; all the northern European countries (Switzerland/Germany/Netherlands/Denmark/Sweden/ Norway) have big surpluses, usually bigger than Germany in relative terms.  Four of those six aren’t even in the euro.