AMERICA THE BALANCED / PROJECT SYNDICATE

America, the Balanced

Jeffrey Frankel

OCT 20, 2014

CAMBRIDGE – When the United States’ current account fell into deficit in 1982, the US Council of Economic Advisers accurately predicted record deficits for years to come, owing to budget deficits, a low national saving rate, and an overvalued dollar. If the US did not adjust, knowledgeable forecasters intoned, it would go from being the world’s largest creditor to its largest debtor. Many of us worried that the imbalances were unsustainable, and might end in a “hard landing” for the dollar if and when global investors tired of holding it.

 

The indebtedness forecasts were correct. Indeed, every year for more than three decades, the US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) has reported a current-account deficit. And yet now we must ask whether the US current-account deficit is still a problem.

 

For starters, the world’s investors declared loud and clear in 2008 that they were not concerned about the sustainability of US deficits. When the global financial crisis erupted, they flooded into dollar assets, even though the crisis originated in the United States.

 

Moreover, a substantial amount of US adjustment has taken place since 1982 – for example, the dollar depreciations of 1985-1987 and 2002-2007 and the fiscal retrenchments of 1992-2000 and 2009-2014. The big increase in domestic output of shale oil and gas has also helped the trade balance recently.

 

As a result, the US current-account deficit in 2013 had narrowed by half in dollar terms from its 2006 peak, and from 5.8% of GDP to 2.4%. This is a decline of two-thirds when expressed as a share of global output.

 

A symmetric adjustment has also occurred in China, via real appreciation of its currency and higher prices for labor and land. China’s current-account surplus peaked in 2008 at more than 10% of GDP and has since narrowed dramatically, to 1.9% last year. China’s trade adjustment in some respects followed that of Japan, the original focus of American trade anxieties in the 1980s.

 

I propose a third, more speculative reason why it may be time to stop worrying about the US current-account deficit. It is possible that, properly measured, the true deficits were smaller than has been reported, and even that, in some years, they were not there at all.

 

Every year, US residents take some of what they earn in overseas investment income – interest on bonds, dividends on equities, and repatriated profits on direct investment – and reinvest it then and there. For example, corporations plow overseas profits back into their operations, often to avoid paying the high US corporate income tax implied by repatriating those earnings.

Technically, this should be recorded as a bigger surplus on the investment-income account, matched by greater acquisition of assets overseas. Often it is counted correctly. But there is reason to think that this is not always the case.
 

Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/true-us-current-account-balance-in-surplus-by-jeffrey-frankel-2014-10#CUQtXZHOTPi1Oqvp.99