In that case countries that rely on large current account surpluses to absorb their excess capacity would be forced into reducing their surpluses and reducing their capacity.
Before the crisis the governments of both Ireland and Spain ran budget surpluses.
Until East and West even out the surpluses and deficits in their economies, sovereign-wealth funds will not go away.
The first is that global payments are significantly out of balance, with a huge US current account deficit offset by surpluses elsewhere.
All members worry about an unbalanced recovery, with big trade surpluses in some countries and big deficits elsewhere; but they do not yet agree on its underlying cause or solution.
Makeup deficits and increase surpluses
The surpluses of both Germany and Japan are shrinking fast.
The chief problem was to find how to prevent surpluses from depressing domestic prices .
Countries that ran trade deficits demanded policy changes of those who ran chronic surpluses - calls that were mostly snubbed.
It has tapped domestic markets in the past when running budget surpluses, to prove that it could borrow more if it needed to, says Ms Ermolenko.
In the 1960s, impoverished Asia was starved of capital while the West had tons of it sitting idle. So the Asian Development Bank (ADB) was created to recycle the rich world's surpluses.
Social Security has been running surpluses for the last quarter-century, banking those surpluses in a special account, the so-called trust fund.
Asian countries, other than Japan, accumulated the surpluses largely by supplying cheap goods and services to the us.
The surpluses of the us, UK and Irish private sectors are forecast at close to 10 per cent of GDP, which is even higher than in Germany.
The Conservatives achieved surpluses on current account.
Year after year, they point out, it runs large current-account surpluses.
Gordon Brown, Britain's prime minister, wants countries with big surpluses, such as China and the oil-rich Gulf states, to contribute more.
But the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has turned deficits into surpluses.
The counterparts to these surpluses are deficits in places such as Britain, Spain and most notably America.
And when we talk of China these days, we tend to think only of Shanghai and skyscrapers, of trade surpluses and rapid economic growth and above all, of amazing poverty reduction.
As the years went by, those trade surpluses just kept growing - and so did China's hoard of foreign assets.
The crucial difference, however, is that Japan has been running current-account surpluses, not deficits.
In the past, these surpluses were offset by American deficits.
An undervalued currency always promotes trade surpluses, and China is no different.
The essential ingredient of a successful exit is, instead, to use the huge surpluses of the private sector to fund higher investment, both public and private, across the world.
In addition, even some countries with surpluses, such as Russia, have Banks that have grown accustomed to easy foreign lending because of the integration of global finance.
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