Today, I watched a speech by Ben Bernanke discussing the cause of the current Great Recession. For several years, he has been warning about the “savings glut”, i.e., those nations like China who run huge cash surpluses and lend the cash back to the consuming nations, effectively pushing up debt levels in our national economy. I’ve always felt like that was blaming somebody else for…
Yesterday we learned the U.S. trade deficit decreased unexpectedly. The surprise was not that imports fell for the seventh consecutive month, but that exports actually rose for the first time in six months, despite the strong dollar. Our trade deficit in 2006 was $681 billion compared with an estimate of only $373 billion this year. Nice trendline, indeed! Early stage economies tend to grow by…