September 27, 2010
The New York Times assigned former Washington Post reporter Sebastian Mallaby to review Robert Reich’s new book, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future. It is unfortunate that they couldn’t find someone familiar who knew some economics for this task.
Near the beginning of the review, Mallaby tells readers:
“Reich insists instead that American consumers, and particularly the middle class, have been buying too little. For years, the United States has consumed more than it has produced; the excess demand has sucked in products from abroad, which is why the nation has run a trade deficit. The idea that the economy has suffered from a lack of demand is, shall we say, eccentric.”
Actually, there are few economists who would say that the United States had excess demand throughout most of the last decade, so Robert Reich is exactly right on this point and Sebastian Mallaby is completely wrong. The trade deficit was the result of an over-valued dollar.
This is actually very basic economics. The value of the dollar determines the relative price of foreign and domestic goods. If the dollar is sufficiently over-valued then the United States could be running a trade deficit even when demand is grossly inadequate — as is the case at present. The high dollar makes imports very cheap for people in the United States, which causes us to consume large amounts of imports. It also makes U.S. exports expensive to people living in other countries, which means that we will have weak exports. It is remarkably that Mallaby is apparently unfamiliar with this basic logic and that his mistake was apparently not caught by the editor.
Comments