Among the advanced countries, it is the US which has a large saving-investment gap. Among the EMEs, it is China, which has the largest saving surplus. The causation, however, is not very clear: whether it is excess saving in China or excess consumption in the US that contributed to the crisis.
2  BIS Review 15/2010  Apart from the saving-investment imbalances, there has been concurrent accumulation of large foreign exchange reserves by the EMEs, particularly China, also as self insurance against sudden reversal of capital flows (Table 2). It is argued that accumulation of reserves, particularly from trade surplus, resulted in misalignment of exchange rates. This prevented the global imbalances to adjust.