Chimerica

Like all insecure nations, modern country X has a great propensity to work and save. Like all imperial powers in transition to a humbler status, the U.S. has a great compulsion to borrow and spend in order to maintain a lifestyle which it can no longer really afford.
[...] The U.S. has solved the old problem of underconsumption by creating a welfare state and military industrial complex. It no longer needs an army of consumers, but a reserve army of savers. In country X, by contrast, the financial system discourages consumption [...] country X has thus evolved into a natural saver of last resort for the U.S. [...] The U.S. economic boom is maturing. As inflationary wrinkles appear, even country X will begin to wonder if they should recycle their dollars as freely as they have so far [...] The U.S. Treasury may accidently destroy the unique trans-Pacific financial equilibrium now sustaining U.S. recovery.

I would not be surprised to read this in today’s newspaper commenting on the complex mutual dependencies between the U.S. and China. The symbiosis between these two major world economies is what Niall Ferguson referred to as Chimerica, and it is not as strong as it used to be before the financial crisis reached its peak in 2008.

The commentary quoted higher, however, was written by David Hole in the Financial Times of October 17, 1984 (and later reprinted in Harvard Business Review in July 1985). The country X is not China, but… Japan.

Same play, different protagonists.