Savings

I used to hear how the Japanese put so much more money in their savings accounts than Americans, and Americans should be more like the Japanese and save more. I heard that refrain for years. I haven't heard it lately.

Today I'm looking at Google news and I come across China: Currency Manipulation wherein the author has this to say about national savings rates:

It is pretty clear to me that domestic policies within China are at the source of the huge imbalance between production and consumption. High savings rates rarely have to do with culture or personal preferences, as is widely assumed, and a lot to do with policies that affect the balance between production and consumption. After all a nation’s savings is simply its total production minus its total consumption, and to the extent that there are explicit policies aimed at constraining consumption and boosting production, they inevitably affect the savings rate. These policies also inevitably force a rising trade surplus onto the rest of the world.

I thought this was a pretty good explanation of savings rates, and also helps explain the big trade surplus China is running. I mean one way to constrain consumption is to not pay your workers very much, then they won't have any extra money to buy stuff. As far as the trade surplus goes, making a lot of extra stuff is no guarantee that anyone will buy it. However, if you are skrimping on the pay for your workers, then your costs may be lower and you might be able to sell it.

I suspect this is all part of PRC's plan for world domination. By building everything cheaper than anyone else, they are destroying everyone else's industries, and their economies as well. Pretty soon China will have a monopoly on making everything. That is when they will let the yuan float, prices for Chinese goods will rise, and we will all be in the poorhouse.

The whole article is rather long and kind of involved, I only got about half through it before I gave up.