Wednesday, November 16, 2011
A scare
I noticed some dodgy figures from the economist book of same on 18th October. During the rather long advert. break on ITV3 last night I noticed some more, this time about balances of payments, or rather the lack thereof.
So I knew that China was running a whopping surplus but I had not realised that that for Germany at $250bn (in 2008) was more than half as big as that for China. Most of the other big surpluses were energy flavoured, but we also had the rest of the German world (including here the Dutch) and the Nordic world up there at the top table.
And I knew that the US was running a whopping deficit. But after that, Spain swings in with a hefty $150bn, then Italy, France, Greece and the UK running down from $80bn to $40bn. Perhaps it really is just as well for us Brits. than the pound can run down too. (This from someone who was mildy in favour of us joining the euro at the time that we might have joined. Also a veteran of at least one small review of a small departmental euro readiness project).
Oddly, resource rich Australia runs a larger current account deficit than we do on an economy a bit more than a third the size. Perhaps they balance their books by flogging the rights to anything that can be dug up to the Chinese.
But what is so different about the Germans?
So I knew that China was running a whopping surplus but I had not realised that that for Germany at $250bn (in 2008) was more than half as big as that for China. Most of the other big surpluses were energy flavoured, but we also had the rest of the German world (including here the Dutch) and the Nordic world up there at the top table.
And I knew that the US was running a whopping deficit. But after that, Spain swings in with a hefty $150bn, then Italy, France, Greece and the UK running down from $80bn to $40bn. Perhaps it really is just as well for us Brits. than the pound can run down too. (This from someone who was mildy in favour of us joining the euro at the time that we might have joined. Also a veteran of at least one small review of a small departmental euro readiness project).
Oddly, resource rich Australia runs a larger current account deficit than we do on an economy a bit more than a third the size. Perhaps they balance their books by flogging the rights to anything that can be dug up to the Chinese.
But what is so different about the Germans?
# posted by Jim @ 12:08 AM 
