Outsourcing financial repression to China and insourcing it back

It is well known that financial repression more or less disappeared in advanced economies during the 1980s and 1990s, but has been making a comeback recently. Is it possible that financial repression did not actually disappear, but was simply outsourced to China? And the comeback that we are seeing after the Global Financial Crisis is simply a case of insourcing the repression back?

This thought occurred to me after reading an IMF Working Paper on “Sovereign Debt Composition in Advanced Economies: A Historical Perspective”. What this paper shows is that many of the nice things that happened to sovereign debt in advanced economies prior to the Global Financial Crisis was facilitated by the robust demand for this debt by foreign central banks. In fact, the authors refer to this period not as the Great Moderation, but as the Great Accumulation. Though they do not mention China specifically, it is clear that the Great Accumulation is driven to a great extent by China. It is also clear that much of the Chinese reserve accumulation is made possible by the enormous financial repression within that country.

This leads me to my hypothesis that just as the advanced economies outsourced their manufacturing to more efficient manufacturers in China, they outsourced their financial repression to the most efficient manufacturer of financial repression – China. Now that China is becoming a less efficient and less willing provider of financial repression, advanced economies are insourcing this job back to their own central banks.

In this view of things, we overestimated the global reduction of financial repression in the 1990s and are overestimating the rise in financial repression since the crisis.

Posted at 11:59 am IST on Mon, 22 Sep 2014         permanent link

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