For more than 20 years, the United States has run current-account deficits with the rest of the world—and is now the world’s largest international debtor. Because the world is on a dollar standard, the United States is unique in having a virtually unlimited international line of credit which is largely denominated in its own currency, i.e., dollars. In contrast, foreign debtor countries must learn to live with currency mismatches where their banks’ and other corporate international liabilities are dollar denominated but their assets are denominated in the domestic currency. As these mismatches cumulate, any foreign country is ultimately forced to repay its debts in order to avoid a run on its currency. But however precarious and over-leveraged the financing of individual American borrowers—including American banks, which intermediate such borrowing internationally—might be, they are invulnerable to dollar devaluation. In effect, America’s collective current-account deficits are sustainable indefinitely.
Working Papers Index
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Stanford University, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number
01013.
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)