The Great Rebalancing Quotes

“If rural migration was sufficiently large, it tended to repress wage growth. This made it fairly common for worker productivity to grow quickly as less productive rural workers and peasants moved to the industrial centers, where their productivity was much higher, but for wages to fail to keep pace. When this happens wage growth will lag productivity growth and the worker’s share of total income will decline, even as total income might rise.”
― Michael Pettis, The Great Rebalancing: Trade, Conflict, and the Perilous Road Ahead for the World Economy - Updated Edition

“For reasons we will see in chapter 6, Europe’s crisis will probably lead to a partial breakup of the euro as well as to defaults or debt restructurings among one or more European sovereign borrowers. The only things likely to save the euro—fiscal union or, as I discuss in chapter 6, a major reversal of German trade imbalances—seem politically improbable as of the time of this writing.”
― Michael Pettis, The Great Rebalancing: Trade, Conflict, and the Perilous Road Ahead for the World Economy - Updated Edition

“The source of the global crisis through which we are living can be found in the great trade and capital flow imbalances of the past decade or two. Unfortunately because balance of payments mechanisms are so poorly understood, much of the debate about the crisis is caught up in muddled analysis.”
― Michael Pettis, The Great Rebalancing: Trade, Conflict, and the Perilous Road Ahead for the World Economy - Updated Edition