Blaming the Chinese for the credit crunch

This article over at the Foreign Policy website, by Helen Mees, dusts off an argument that I have mentioned here on Samizdata before, (in relation to a comment by the US investor and commentator Peter Schiff) namely, that China, by using its vast foreign exchange reserves to buy Western government debt, thereby pushed down long-term interest rates and encouraged the kind of reckless lending that ended up going ker-boom! in 2007-2008. And if only the Chinese had not flogged us all those artificially cheap computer parts and children's toys (made cheap by that naughty fixed exchange rate regime for the yuan), they would not have made so much money to then lend to us Westerners to blow on housing we cannot really afford. (Here is another old post of mine on the same subject of debt/savings imbalances between the West and China.)

The problem with this line of reasoning is that if, say, a country has earned genuine income by selling something valuable and useful (like toys, cars, electronic components or whatnot), and invested the proceeds abroad in things that can generate new wealth in the future, what is the problem? The problem is not that China invested huge savings and other surpluses into the West - after all, in the 19th Century, the UK invested large capital surpluses in places such as the US, Canada and Argentina (now there's an irony, Ed). And there was nothing "imbalanced" about that. If real savings - not central bank funny money created out of thin air - gets lent to people to invest, that's hardly bad. The problem is if the money is lent to people buying homes as part of a broader speculative bubble in real estate, say. And there is no doubt that domestic policy in the West, most definitely in the US, encouraged unwise lending and borrowing for property, consumer goods and so on, rather than investment in new technologies and industries.

The comment thread on the FP item are interesting, where it is contested that subprime borrowing made up only a tiny fraction of the US mortgage market. It did not, since one of the issues with the sub-prime market and the huge losses sustained by banks was how sub-prime debt was mixed up with better quality stuff and then sold to investors as if it is was all investment-grade, when it was wasn't. For example, here is a comment from a person called "RRAFAY":

"Actually, 5% of Subprime is enough to cause a crash. Especially, when no mention is made of how these mortgages were leveraged. Secondly, Alt-A is not mentioned either. When both are taken together, they represent roughly 15% of the US mortgage market. Secondly, the idea that Chinese surplus capital led to an excess supply of money is so weak, that it is mind boggling that someone would even suggest this. China only holds 7% of total US debt. Each country mentioned had a housing crisis, Ireland, Spain, and the US."

In my view, it is certainly true that in a world of free capital movements, if a country A can export a vast amount of its capital into country B, and people in the latter country are not constrained by proper market disciplines and there is already a full-blown encouragement of high borrowing and lax lending, then the added money will pour fuel on the fire. But in the main, I think it is a pretty silly line of argument to say that it is the fault of the Chinese for having earned so much money and then reinvested it. There's something just not quite right about that argument on so many levels.