“How China’s external current account surplus will evolve in the coming years is one of the key questions on the economic outlook for China and the global economy both,” said a World Bank official in Beijing recently. The IMF presented its own answer to that question in a July 2010 report on the Chinese economy, forecasting a gentle, steady rise in China’s current account surplus, relative to its GDP, as shown in the top figure above. The forecast comfortingly shows the surplus staying well below its 2007 peak. Yet since China’s economy is growing much faster than the world economy, the IMF understates the upward trajectory of China’s growing imbalances with the rest of the world. This we show in the bottom figure, which projects China’s surplus relative to world GDP using the IMF’s own assumptions. By this measure, China’s surplus will surpass its 2008 peak within two years. If China continues to recycle dollars abroad at this pace, the global economy will become considerably more vulnerable to shocks from capital flow reversals.

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The shape of U.S. labor market declines and recoveries—as measured by the current level of employment relative to the prior peak—has changed dramatically over the past two decades. From the 1940s through the 1970s, they exhibited a V-shape of sharp declines and rapid recoveries, as seen in the chart above. By the 1990s they took on a U-shape, signifying longer, persistent unemployment. “During times like the 1950s and 1960s, a rising level of educational attainment kept up with this rising demand for skill,” MIT economist David Autor writes, “but since the late 1970s and early 1980s, the rise in U.S. education levels has not kept up with the rising demand for skilled workers.” The labor demand differential is particularly stark today: unemployment among the college-educated stands at 4.5%, compared with 14.7% for those without high school degrees.  Unemployment compensation, the main tool in the U.S. arsenal to address joblessness, was created back in 1935 to buffer relatively short stints of unemployment, but the need today continuously to extend benefits is a sign that policy has got to address the skills mismatch far more effectively.

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All countries with central banks exercise monetary sovereignty, right?  Nobel economist Paul Krugman certainly thinks so.  “Wow,” he wrote, after reading Benn Steil and Manuel Hinds say otherwise in the Financial Times on May 24, “Have these guys ever talked to anyone in Sweden, which doesn’t need euros to create more kronor?” Fortunately, we have the data, which is better than talk.  Since Mr. Krugman throws Australia into the mix, we will too.  As the figures above illustrate, when the Swedish and Australian central banks expanded credit dramatically during the recent financial crisis their net foreign assets plummeted.  And this is not merely a crisis effect, as the three decades of Australian data show. So it turns out that you do indeed need euros and (American) dollars to create kronor and Australian dollars.  A country that plows on creating credit without them eventually becomes a ward of the IMF.

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Back in 2000, the European Central Bank’s first president, Wim Duisenberg, explained how he knew the Bank’s operational framework for implementing monetary policy was working well.  It was, he said, successfully “steering short-term market interest rates” where the Bank wanted them to go.  Prior to the financial crisis, that was indeed the case: the ECB’s policy rate was tightly connected to important short-term interest rates, such as the 3-month government borrowing rate.  In a growing swath of the eurozone, however, this is no longer the case.  As the figures above show, the correlation between the ECB’s policy rate and actual government borrowing rates in Spain, Greece, Italy, Ireland, and Portugal has plummeted since the ECB began its debt-buying program.  The market’s view of default risk on eurozone government debt has increasingly come to dominate these rates, which themselves strongly influence borrowing rates in the private sector.  By Duisenberg’s criterion, monetary policy in the eurozone is becoming less and less effective.  The only thing that will reverse this trend is a resolution of Europe’s growing bank and government debt crisis.  Yet by continually insisting that debt restructuring is out of the question, the ECB is only delaying such a resolution – and almost surely making it more costly.

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In a major speech on April 13th laying out his blueprint for reducing America’s long-term debt burden, President Obama drew a sharp contrast between the outlook today and the much rosier one a decade ago. In 2000, he claimed, “we were prepared for the retirement of the Baby Boomers.” Yet whereas the national debt burden today, at around 65% of GDP and rising fast, is much higher than it was in 2000, the long-term fiscal path the nation was on was as unviable then as it is today. This is illustrated starkly by the figure on the left. The driver of the sharply rising debt curves was, and still is, retirees – and specifically two programs to care for them, Medicare and Social Security, as shown by the bars in the figure on the right. President Obama is surely right to draw attention to the challenge of funding retiree entitlements. He is on less firm ground, however, in suggesting that the last Democratic administration had a handle on this. 2000 was no Golden Age of preparedness for our Golden Years.

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