Michael Pettis claims that the US trade deficit is the result of excess savings giving rise to capital inflows.

    https://www.financialsense.com/blog/19242/how-trump-can-fix-americas-trade-imbalance

    the global economy is overflowing with excess savings. The need to park these excess savings somewhere safe is what fuels global capital flows, in turn giving rise to trade imbalances

    After all, even though interest rates are historically low and U.S. corporate balance sheets are amassing heaps of nonproductive cash, the U.S. economy is still absorbing massive sums of capital from overseas. Clearly, this isn’t happening because U.S. firms need foreign capital. The reason for these imbalanced capital flows is that foreign investors need a safe place to direct their excess savings. With the deepest, best-governed, and friendliest capital markets, the United States is the obvious destination.

    Furthermore,

    Economists who contend that the U.S. economy needs foreign capital to compensate for low domestic savings rates are mostly confused about why U.S. savings rates are so low and how they respond to capital inflows. A fundamental requirement of the balance of payments is that net capital inflows must boost the gap between investment and savings, and if capital inflows do not cause domestic investment to rise, they must cause domestic savings to decline.

    So he proposes the solution :

    If it is excess savings in surplus countries that drive capital and trade imbalances globally, then taxing capital inflows is not just the most efficient way to rebalance the U.S. trade ledger—it may perhaps be the only way.

    He further claims the following benefits of this solution :

    1) Balancing trade flexibly: A well-designed system of taxing capital inflows would help broadly rebalance the U.S. current and capital accounts over several years.

    2) Enhancing financial stability: Because it would be a one-off tax on transactions, this tax wouldn’t treat all investment equally. It would more heavily penalize short-term, speculative inflows while barely affecting returns on longer-term investment into factories and other production and logistics facilities, much like a Tobin tax. Among other things, such a tax would not require huge shifts in the value of the dollar because it focuses so effectively on the most damaging kinds of capital inflows.

    3) Treating economic actors more efficiently: Whereas tariffs subsidize some U.S. producers at the expense of others, taxing capital inflows would benefit most domestic producers with the costs borne primarily by banks and speculators. Major international banks would lose out on a tax on capital inflows because they profit from the intermediation of capital flows into and out of the country, and because they fund themselves with cheap, short-term money that they redirect to borrowers at higher rates. This is why the biggest opponents of a tax on capital inflows are likely to be major international banks.

    What is your opinion of Michael Pettis theory of reducing trade deficits via taxing incoming capital flows?
    byu/New_Elk_5783 inAskEconomics



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