Pity President Barack Obama. He won power partly because of the global economic crisis. He himself, most of his fellow citizens and much of the rest of the world agree that the US broke the world economy and now has the duty to fix it. Unhappily, this consensus is false. The crisis is a product of the global economy. It cannot be cured by the US alone.
Happily, Mr Obama has the authority needed to lead the world towards a resolution: his hands are clean, and his lack of desire to exculpate his country is evident. It is also in the interest of his country and the world that the world economy be put on a sounder footing. Should this effort fail, I fear a resurgence of protectionism will be the outcome.
What then is the global failure? It is the malign interaction between some countries’ propensity towards chronic excess supply and other countries’ opposite propensity towards excess demand. This is the theme of my book Fixing Global Finance. But the biggest point about the world economy today is that the credit-fuelled household borrowing that supported the excess demand in deficit countries has come to a sudden stop. Unless this is reversed, excess supply of surplus countries must also collapse. This statement follows as a matter of logic: at world level, supply must equal demand. The question is only how the adjustment occurs.
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