Reddit mentions of The Great Rebalancing: Trade, Conflict, and the Perilous Road Ahead for the World Economy

There are two different definitions of savings going on here. A country's savings rate and household savings rates. These are different.

The Great Rebalancing by Michael Pettis gives a much less mystical and much more convincing explanation of why a country's savings rate is high... policy.

Doing a quick simulation (Normally distributed data with a mean of 25 and a standard deviation of 7 and splitting that data arbitrarily in half; this seems to approximate the given country savings data fairly well, I don't have time/motivation to check exactly) 25% of the time you'd get a mean difference above 5. I'm going to guess a proper statistical analysis will show this isn't statistically significant.

This makes me highly skeptical of his second claim. While it seems a household savings rate, especially with matched data as he presents, might have something more to do with language, I'm wondering how much he massaged his data to get this result. And again, Pettis presents policy arguments for household savings that account for behavior that remove the convenience and necessity of moral or cultural arguments.

Happy reddit Birthday!

I am familiar with Yasheng Huang but have never read his points. If you remember a link, it'd be appreciated, but don't sweat it. Most of what I've learned has come from a mix of sources.

"Mainsteam" news helps you accumulate information here and there.

Blogs have been most important for me. I am a huge fan of Michael Pettis's China Financial Markets at mpettis.com. Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis is on my daily at globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com. He has a debate going on right now with Pettis if you look for the word China in the posts from the last few days. Also Acting Man blog, The Daily Bell mises.org, and a few other "Austrian" and libertarian sources. And reddit of course.

I read a lot of books as well, but the only one on China's current economic conditions has been Pettis's "The Great Rebalancing," which I highly recommend.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Rebalancing-Conflict-Perilous/dp/0691158681

It discusses global economics through a number of axiomatic trade and financial relationships which must hold. By familiarizing ourselves with them, including really understanding things like BoT, we can avoid making "dumb" mistakes like treating China's reserves like a proverbial slush fund. And I disagree with him on many points, but his way of looking at things is rock solid.