Balance of Payments Imbalances, by Alan Greenspan

International Monetary Fund

• Publisher: INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781451950113

NONE

Balance of Payments Imbalances

ALAN GREENSPAN

Considering the nature of the title of my paper, I am incredibly impressed that there are so many people who wish to hear what I have to say on this subject.

Thank you, Sir Andrew and Mr. Van Houtven.

The financial crisis that erupted on August 9 was an accident waiting to happen. Credit spreads across all global asset classes had become compressed to clearly unsustainable levels. Something had to give. If the crisis had not been triggered by a mispricing of securitized U.S. subprime mortgages, it would have eventually erupted in some other sector or market. The candidate of many analysts in recent years has been a dramatic and abrupt unwinding of America’s huge current account deficit, with all sorts of extraordinary aftermaths as a consequence. To date this has not happened. But fear-laden concerns put that deficit on the agenda of virtually every international gathering I attended as Fed chairman and since.

Unless protectionist forces drain the flexibility of the international financial system, I do not view the ultimate unwinding of America’s current account deficit, amounting to 6 percent of our GDP, as a cause for undue alarm. Apprehensions about the U.S. external deficit are certainly not groundless. At some point, foreign investors will balk at increasing the share of dollar-denominated assets in the portfolios they hold. There obviously is a limit to the extent that U.S. financial obligations to foreigners can reach. And perhaps the recent decline in the U.S. dollar and shrinkage of the current account deficit is an indication that America is approaching that limit.

In 2006, the financing of the deficit siphoned off almost three-fifths of all the cross-border savings¹ of the 67 countries that ran current account surpluses in that year. Developing countries, which accounted for nearly half the value of those surpluses, were apparently unable to find sufficiently profitable investments at home that overcame market and political risk. The United States a decade ago likely could not have run up today’s near-$800 billion annual deficit for the simple reason that we could not have attracted the foreign savings to finance it. In 1995, for example, total cross-border saving was less than $300 billion.

But the reason I conclude that the persistently growing U.S. current account deficit does not have seriously negative consequences for the U.S. economy is that those deficits are a small part of a far larger but less-threatening, ever-expanding specialization and division of labor that is irreversibly evolving in our increasingly complex global environment.

Pulling together the pieces of evidence—anecdotal, circumstantial, and statistical—strongly suggests, to me at least, that the current account deficit is best viewed as a segment of a broader set of rising deficits and offsetting surpluses that reflect transactions of U.S. economic entities—households, businesses, and governments—mostly within the borders of the United States.

The long-term updrift in this broader swath of unconsolidated deficits and mostly offsetting surpluses of economic entities has been persistent but gradual for decades, probably generations. However, the component of that broad set that captures only the net foreign financing of the imbalances of the individual U.S. economic entities, our current account deficit, increased from negligible in the early 1990s to 6.2 percent of our GDP by 2006.

What data we have suggest that the rise in America’s current account deficit as a percentage of GDP since early this decade is, to a large extent, the result of American business and government’s turning to foreign sources of deficit funding in place of domestic funding, and not predominantly the result of an acceleration in the secular uptrend in economically stressful company or government imbalances. Household borrowing, incidentally, from abroad to finance shortfalls in cash flow has always been negligible.

In my judgment, policymakers have been focusing too narrowly on foreign claims on U.S. residents rather than on all claims, both foreign and domestic, that influence economic behavior and can be a cause of systemic concern. It is the level of debt, not the source of its financing, that should engage us. Our conventional tabulations are often too loosely rooted in the obsession of the mercantilists of the early eighteenth century to achieve a surplus in their balance of payments which brought them gold in settlement, then the mistaken standard of the wealth of the nation.

Were we to measure financial net balances of much smaller geographic divisions, such as the individual American states or Canadian provinces, which we do not, or of much larger groupings of nations, such as South America or Asia, the trends in these measures and their seeming implications could be quite different from those extracted solely from the conventional nation-delineated measure of current account balance.

The choice of the appropriate geographical unit for measurement should depend on what we are trying to find out. I presume that, in most instances, at least in the policy setting, we seek to judge the degree of economic stress that could augur significantly adverse economic outcomes. We should require data on financial balances at the level of detail at which economic decisions are made: individual households, businesses, and governments. Those data are the equivalent of current account balances, but at the level of individual economic entities where leverage and stress are experienced, and hence, where actions and trends that may stabilize economies originate.

National borders, of course, do matter, at least to some extent. Debt service payments on foreign loans ultimately must be funded from exports of tradable goods and services or from capital inflows, whereas domestic debt has a broader base from which it can be serviced. For a ...