Morality of the story. You cannot have savings exceeding investment (S-I) and imports exceeding exports (M-X) unless that is offset by government expenditure financed by means other than taxes a.k.a. deficit spending (T-G). Excess savings and imports take income out of the economy and excess government spending puts it back.
If you want T to be equal to G (balanced budget) and S=I (if S=I and T=G then necessarily M has to be equal X ) then GDP has to fall to the point where the excessive desire to save is eliminated, but lower GDP means economy at bellow its potential at the price of unemployment.
In order to start understanding what is going on including horror of all horrors the printing of money by the FED you should start by considering a phenomenon called secular stagnation.
From the Wikipedia.
The term secular stagnation refers to a market economy with a chronic (secular or long-term) lack of demand. Historically, a booming economy with low unemployment and high GDP growth (i.e., an economy at or above capacity) would generate inflation in wages and products. However, an economy facing secular stagnation behaves as if it is operating below capacity, even when the economy appears to be booming; inflation does not appear. In a healthy economy, if household savings exceed business investments, interest rates fall; lower interest rates stimulate spending and investment, which bring savings and investments into balance. However, an economy facing secular stagnation may require an interest rate below zero to bring savings and investment into balance. The surplus of savings over investment may be generating price appreciation in financial assets or real estate. For example, the U.S. had low unemployment but low inflation in the years leading up to the Great Recession, although a massive housing bubble developed.
An analysis of stagnation and what is now called financialization was provided in the 1980s by Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy, coeditors of the independent socialist journal Monthly Review. Magdoff was a former economic advisor to Vice President Henry A. Wallace in Roosevelt’s New Deal administration, while Sweezy was a former Harvard economics professor. In their 1987 book, Stagnation and the Financial Explosion, they argued, based on Keynes, Hansen, Michał Kalecki, and Marx, and marshaling extensive empirical data,[citation needed] that, contrary to the usual way of thinking, stagnation or slow growth was the norm for mature, monopolistic (or oligopolistic) economies, while rapid growth was the exception.[9]Private accumulation had a strong tendency to weak growth and high levels of excess capacity and unemployment/underemployment, which could, however, be countered in part by such exogenous factors as state spending (military and civilian), epoch-making technological innovations (for example, the automobile in its expansionary period), and the growth of finance.[10] In the 1980s and 1990s Magdoff and Sweezy argued that a financial explosion of long duration was lifting the economy, but this would eventually compound the contradictions of the system, producing ever bigger speculative bubbles, and leading eventually to a resumption of overt stagnation
Full story here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_stagnation
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