This Economic Letter turns to the recent empirical literature to learn more about the potential risks to the U.S. economy of a possible current account reversal and about the factors that are associated with more disruptive corrections.

Two country applications of equilibrium business cycle methodology have succeeded in matching some key features of international fluctuations. However, discrepancies between theory and data remain. This paper identifies a new anomaly related to a basic property of typical models: the prediction...

Meissner and Taylor do a splendid job of making the history of the last great globalization relevant to the current great rebalancing. In their admirably understated way, they have argued that there is no credible evidence supporting the status quo, and have shown that the savings and investment...

Two contemporary issues provide reason to focus on national saving and investment: the debate over public pensions, and pensions more generally, in all rich countries; and the large global current account imbalances, conceptually the difference between national savings and domestic investment....