Rethinking Trade Imbalances

If you want to listen to this, I suggest using headphones. For me the volume comes out too low otherwise.Later this week I’ll be giving a presentation to Markus Brunnermeier’s macroeconomics webinar at Princeton; he asked me to talk about “geoeconomics”, which could mean a lot of things. But I decided to talk about a new view of trade imbalances, associated especially with Michael Pettis, that has been gaining some traction lately. It’s also mostly wrong, and some friends in the international economics community have asked me to take it on. I’ve already prepared a slide show for the presentation, and I thought I’d try talking about that slide show here.This, by the way, is sort of the real me — or at least who I wanted to be: wonkish and relatively apolitical. Alas, the world had other ideas. Get full access to Paul Krugman at paulkrugman.substack.com/subscribe