Por qué los chinos compran tantos bonos del tesoro norteamericanos

“People are saving like crazy in China. An important reason is that the environment is much riskier than in the 1980s.” Why riskier? Because state-owned firms began to shed workers, and private companies who hired them provided fewer benefits and less job security.

“When you look at these numbers, it’s just stunning,” said Storesletten. “In manufacturing, for example, the share of the labor force employed by private employers was less than 10 percent as late as 1994, and it’s above 60 percent now. For the urban sector as a whole, the growth is even larger. So we’re really seeing a very rapid change from state-owned firms toward private firms.” In less than 15 years, firms change ownership, companies close down and more are created. “Workers find themselves shifted from safe jobs in state-owned firms to a highly uncertain environment with private employers.”

And while workers’ wages grew during this time span, they didn’t increase at the same pace as labor productivity or per capita GDP (for low- to medium-skilled workers, real wages grew about 6 percent annually from 1992 to 2004 compared with 9 percent real GDP per capita growth. Moreover, entrepreneurial earnings grew far faster than wages did, resulting in growing inequality—another salient feature of China’s economy.) “Suddenly, people have very risky wages; pensions become highly uncertain. People needed to save a lot more. You would see increased savings rates, not only for the young, but also for the old.”

As a result, banks began to accumulate more and more savings deposits (de los trabajadores y de los emprendedores), while their primary borrowers, state-owned firms, were taking out fewer loans as their share of production rapidly declined. “So the banks then become awash in cash,” observes Storesletten. “And what do they do? They buy T-bills.”