FT op-ed in which David Pilling reports that Asia’s Keynesians “take pride in prudence.”
It is an oddly hypocritical logic that Pilling gets around to critiquing:
Chinese officials talk scornfully about US consumers’ proclivity to buy now and figure out the consequences later. Through this prism, the made-in-America crisis is seen as a modern morality tale in which reckless governments and citizens got their comeuppance.
As Pilling points out halfway in the piece, Asian governments have opened their fiscal sluices with a gusto in response to the crisis, remembering that they did too little during the Asian flu of 1997 (on advice of the IMF). In the end, the collective Asian stimulus probably outpaced the West’s. Of course, the big difference was that they were spending now money and we were spending tomorrow money (I will gladly pay you across the rest of my life for a stimulus package today!).
The hypocrisy I see: Asia’s miracle (and China’s especially) does not happen without our spending spree of the last couple of decades. Plus, China in particular ignores plenty of rising “debts” in its system, like the piling up of elders and environmental damage.