Global Imbalances and Structural Change in the United States

The United States has borrowed heavily from the rest of the world since the early 1990s. We build a model where this borrowing is driven by foreign demand for saving – a global savings glut – that matches the dynamics of the U.S. trade balance, real exchange rate, sector-level trade balances, and reallocation of labor across sectors. We use our model to study what will happen when the savings glut ends. The U.S. will run a permanent trade surplus and its real exchange rate will depreciate substantially, but goods sector employment will continue to fall. A sudden stop will cause a sharp trade balance reversal, large real exchange rate depreciation, and painful reallocation across sectors but will have little lasting impact on the U.S. economy’s trajectory.(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)