Michael Pettis Books
Michael Pettis is a professor of finance at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is known for his expertise in Chinese financial markets, global trade imbalances, and macroeconomic policy.
Known for: The Great Rebalancing: Trade, Conflict, and the Perilous Road Ahead for the World Economy, Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace
Books by Michael Pettis
The Great Rebalancing: Trade, Conflict, and the Perilous Road Ahead for the World Economy
In The Great Rebalancing, economist Michael Pettis examines the global economic imbalances that led to the 2008 financial crisis and continue to shape the world economy. He argues that the global fina...
Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace
This book argues that global trade imbalances are not primarily the result of national competitiveness but of domestic inequality. Klein and Pettis explain how the concentration of income and wealth w...
Key Insights from Michael Pettis
Global Imbalances Before the Crisis
To understand the present, we must revisit the three decades that led us to 2008. After the collapse of Bretton Woods, capital became freer to flow across borders, and by the 1990s, globalization had reached a new intensity. The United States became the consumer of last resort, running ever-larger c...
From The Great Rebalancing: Trade, Conflict, and the Perilous Road Ahead for the World Economy
China’s Surplus Model and Its Constraints
China lies at the center of the global rebalancing story. Beginning in the 1980s and accelerating after its 2001 WTO accession, China built its growth model on investment and exports. The state directed an extraordinary share of household savings into manufacturing capacity and infrastructure, under...
From The Great Rebalancing: Trade, Conflict, and the Perilous Road Ahead for the World Economy
Historical Context
After World War II, the architects of the global economy recognized that balance mattered—not only between nations, but within them. The Bretton Woods system, led by figures like Keynes and White, was built to ensure that no country could grow at the expense of another without consequence. Domestic ...
From Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace
Conceptual Framework
To understand how inequality drives trade conflicts, Pettis and Klein build a deceptively simple model grounded in the relationship between income, savings, and consumption. Every economy must balance its output with its spending: what is produced must be bought by someone. When income is distribute...
From Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace
About Michael Pettis
Michael Pettis is a professor of finance at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is known for his expertise in Chinese financial markets, global trade imbalances, and macroeconomic policy.
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Michael Pettis is a professor of finance at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is known for his expertise in Chinese financial markets, global trade imbalances, and macroeconomic policy.
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