This article argues that the U. S. current account deficit emerged in the course of the structural transformation of the U. S. economy as the Fordist production regime underwent a profitability crisis, eroded, and was supplanted by the emerging dominance of the financial sector. This domestic...

Schnabl and Freitag (2009) sketch the causal chain that produced the current account surplus in China and the current account deficit of the U.S. (as a part of global imbalances) as follows: declining interest rates in the U.S. cause a redirection of capital flows into the periphery, rising...

Some authors sketch the causal chain that produced the current account surplus in China and the current account deficit of the US (as a part of global imbalances) as follows: declining interest rates in the US cause a redirection of capital flows into the periphery, rising capital inflows into...

Views on the effectiveness of sterilized reserve intervention vary. Sterilized intervention is generally seen as ineffective in advanced countries while persistent intervention by some emerging markets is often cited as contributing to undervalued exchange rates and current account surpluses....

The External Balance Assessment (EBA) methodology has been developed by the IMF’s Research Department as a successor to the CGER methodology for assessing current accounts and exchange rates in a multilaterally consistent manner. Compared to other approaches, EBA emphasizes distinguishing...