↖  美联储主席格林斯潘回忆录——动荡年代：勇闯新世界-94:CURRENT ACCOUNTS AND DEBT-5..

美联储主席格林斯潘回忆录——动荡年代：勇闯新世界-94:CURRENT ACCOUNTS AND DEBT-5

CURRENT ACCOUNTS AND DEBT 

through accumulation of financial assets or through a reduction in debt is called a financial surplus household, reflecting its positive cash flow. 

Similar designations are applied to businesses and governments—federal, state, 

and local. 

When we consolidate these deficits and surpluses for all U.S. residents, 

we end up with a residual that consists of Americans' net new claims on, or net new debt to, foreigners—that is, our current account surplus or deficit.* 

But before consolidation, the ratios of both financial surpluses and financial deficits of individual U.S. economic entities—households, businesses, 

and governments—relative to their incomes, on average, have been on the rise for decades, possibly even since the nineteenth century. 

For most of that period, deficits of some U.S. resident economic entities were almost wholly matched by surpluses of the remaining economic entities. 

Our current account balances were accordingly small.* 

What is special about the past decade is that the decline in home bias, coupled with significant capital gains on homes and other assets, has fostered a large increase in U.S. residents' purchase of foreign-produced goods and services, willingly 

financed by foreign investors. 

Aggregate net claims against foreigners only (our current account) is an incomplete statistical picture of the degree of potential economic stress. 

It may understate or overstate a pending problem for an economy as a whole. 

Indeed, if we lived in a world where sovereign or other borders were disregarded 

for transactions in goods, services, and assets, measures of stress 

of the most narrowly defined economic units would be unambiguously the 

most informative. 

Nation-defined current account balances have important special uses relating to exchange rates, but I suspect the measure is too often used to signify some more generic malaise. 

That is a mistake. 

*Actually, there are a few small capital transfer reconciling entries needed to achieve the current account balance. 

This is true whether we use the income of individual entities or the nation's gross domestic income or its equivalent gross domestic product. 

There is no income loss in the consolidation of individual incomes into a national total. 

On e exception was America's post-Civil War current account deficits, largely reflecting foreign financing of the vast railroad network that accounted for much of U.S. economic activity through the end of the century. 

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THE AGE OF TURBULENCE 

The trade and financing imbalances have been growing within the borders of the United States for some time. 

They reflect increasing specialization of economic function, which goes back to at least the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. 

Movement away from economic self-sufficiency of individuals and nations arose from the division of labor, a process that continually subdivides tasks, creating ever-deeper levels of specialization and skill and, as a consequence, improves productivity and standards of living. 

Such specialization fosters trade among the nation's economic entities and, 

as it did even during the earliest days of commerce, with our international trading partners. 

Over time, ever-growing proportions of U.S. households, nonfinancial businesses, and governments, both national and local, have funded their capital investments from sources other than their own household income, 

corporations' internal funds, or government taxes. 

In early America, almost all of that financing originated with U.S. financial institutions or other U.S. entities. 

The debt of U.S. residents to foreigners was small. 

The growing (and risk-prone) tendency to borrow in anticipation of future income by a significant proportion of Americans is reflected in a persistent rise in both household and corporate assets and liabilities relative to income. 

A detailed calculation by Federal Reserve Board staff employing data from more than five thousand nonfinancial U.S. corporations for the years 1983 to 2004 found that growth in the sum of deficits of those corporations where capital expenditures exceeded cash flow persistently outpaced the growth in corporate value-added. 

The sum of surpluses and deficits, 

disregarding sign, as a ratio to a proxy for corporate value-added exhibits an average annual increase of 3.5 percent per year.* 

Data on the dispersion of the financial deficits of U.S. economic entities aside from nonfinancial corporations are sparse. 

A separate and less satisfactory calculation of only partly consolidated financial balances of individual economic entities relative to nominal GDP exhibits a rise over the past half century in the absolute sum of surpluses and deficits that is 1.25 percentage points per year faster than the rise of nominal GDP.* 

*The surpluses (and deficits) are measured as income before extraordinary items, plus depreciation, 

minus capital expenditures. The proxy for corporate value-added is gross margin, or sales less cost of goods sold. 

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The increase in the dispersion of the imbalances of the economic entities within U.S. national borders appears to have flattened somewhat over the past decade, according to calculations using data from the partly consolidated financial balances. 

Since the current account deficit accelerated during those years, it is plausible to assume that the overall process of dispersion of imbalances of U.S. economic entities continued but with an increasing proportion of deficits of U.S. households, businesses, and governments being financed from foreign rather than domestic sources. 

This is certainly obvious in the financing of our federal budget deficit and of business capital expenditures.1 In short, the expansion of our current account 

deficit during the past decade arguably reflects the shift in trade and financing 

from within the borders of the United States to cross-border trade and finance. 

Thus, the story of the erosion of our current account balance is a story of domestic financial imbalances that spilled out across sovereign borders in the early 1990s, at which point they were measured as rapidly rising current account deficits.

*The measure estimates saving less investment imbalances among the seven consolidated nonfinancial sectors recorded in U.S. macroeconomic statistics: households, corporations, nonfarm noncorporate business, farms, state and local governments, the federal government, and the rest of the world. 

I include the "rest of the world" sector because it measures surpluses or deficits of 

U.S. residents even though they reflect the accumulation of net claims on, or of obligations to, foreigners. 

The other six sectors reflect net claims on, or obligations to, domestic residents only. 

We do have considerable data on the consequences of surpluses and deficits: levels of unconsolidated debt and assets. The tie, of course, would be exact only if some economic entities always ran a deficit and the remainder always ran a surplus. Then, cumulating the deficits would yield the change in unconsolidated debt outstanding and cumulating the surpluses would yield the change in assets. 

If that were true, we could infer the degree of dispersion from estimates of unconsolidated assets and liabilities. 

Indeed, during the past half century, with the exception of the unusual period 1986-91, when the collapse of the savings-and-loan industry distorted the debt figures, the rate of change in both assets and liabilities relative to nominal GDP does rise.

That in itself is not proof of rising dispersion, but it is merely another statistic that is consistent with my presumption of a rise in dispersion that over the long run has exceeded the rise in nominal GDP. 

Between 1995 and 2006, the proportion of nonfinancial corporate liabilities owed to foreigners rose markedly as a percentage of total nonfinancial corporate liabilities. The proportion of US. Treasury obligations owed to foreigners rose from 23 percent to 44 percent over those years. 

Foreign lending to U.S. households has always been negligible. 

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(未完待续, To be contd)
 

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