Few topics are quite as polarizing as the “savings glut.” The very term is often considered an attempt to shift responsibility for the current crisis away from the United States . That is unfortunate. It is quite possible to believe that the buildup of vulnerabilities that led to the current crisis was a product both of a rise in savings in key emerging markets, a rose that with more than a bit of help from emerging market governments – produced an unnatural uphill flow of capital from the emerging world to the advanced economies, and policy failures in the U.S. and Europe. The savings glut argument was initially put forward to suggest that the United States’ external deficit was a natural response to a rise in savings in the emerging world – and thus to defuse concern about the sustainability of the United States’ large external deficit . But it was equally possible to conclude that the rise in savings in the emerging world reflected policy choices* in the emerging world that helped to maintain an uphill flow of capital – and thus that it wasn’t a natural result of fast growth in the emerging world. This, for example, is the perspective that Martin Wolf takes in his book Fixing Global Finance . Wolf consequently believed that borrowers and lenders alike needed to shift toward a more balanced system even before the current crisis. From this point of view, the savings glut in the emerging world — as there never was much of a global glut , only a glut in some parts of the world — was in large part a result of product of policies that emerging market economies put in place when the global economy — clearly spurred by monetary and fiscal stimulus in the US — started to recover from the 2000-01 recession. China adopted policies that increased Chinese savings and restrained investment to try to keep the renminbi’s large real depreciation after 2002 – a depreciation that reflected the dollar’s depreciation – from leading to an unwanted rise in inflation.

Read more here – The savings glut. Controversy guaranteed.