They show that home equity withdrawal was driven primarily by households with low credit scores and high credit card utilisation rates, who are most likely to have been credit-constrained in the past (Mian and Sufi (2009)). As these constraints loosened, spending rose and saving fell. Liberalisation fed impatience. These patterns are also consistent with an inequality-based explanation for lower saving (Rajan (2010)). Rising inequality may generate an increased desire to “keep up with the Jones’s”. That, in turn, may have led to higher borrowing, and lower net saving, by the poor. And what applies within countries appears also to apply across them. Among advanced countries, there is a significant negative relationship between within-country measures of inequality and the current account position (Chart 15). Rising inequality, by lowering savings rates among the poor, appears to be deficit-inducing. Rising imbalances may have important social, as well as economic, roots. 6  BIS Review 174/2010  BIS Review 174/2010  7  8  BIS Review 174/2010  Global imbalances – future So what will be the key forces driving global imbalances in the period ahead? Judging from the recent past, two factors have been important:   Global financial integration;    Differential savings behaviour. Consider in turn their likely evolution. Global financial integration. In the period ahead, this will be shaped by a number of mediumterm structural factors. One key such factor is cross-country GDP convergence.
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