Rebalancing?

Brad Setser is back from his sanctuary in the dark corners of the US where blogging is a no-no. Notable attention should be attributed to his recent post on global imbalances which note that although the petro exporters are seeing their surplus decline Asia is ramping up those surpluses. As I have always said on Brad Setser you would be a poor international economist if you did not read him: Note especially his remarks on the capital outflows from Japan which translates into a growing net income balance as I also noted recently. Here is Brad ...

The current account surplus of the world's big oil exporters is now falling.   At least that is what the IMF believes, with good reason.   All the oil exporters ramped up their spending and investment last year. 

But rather than reducing the US deficit -- my read of the latest US data is different than that of the New York Times(more on that later) -- the fall in the oil surplus seems to be leading to an increase in Asia's surplus.

China's q1 surplus is up.  Japan's q1 surplus is up too.  

Japan's March current account surplus was close to $30b (more from the FT).  $30b strikes me as rather large.