But is not a stronger yen and a weaker dollar just what is needed to reduce Japan's large current-account surplus and America's current-account deficit?
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The recession and low oil prices (not to mention the collapse of Enron) have swung the state from budget surplus to its largest-ever projected deficit.
All of which should help increase the trade surplus and further reduce the current-account deficit.
This will move the region from a current-account deficit to a surplus, causing the demand for dollars to subside.
Even so, his projections showed the current budget moving from deficit into surplus in 2009-10, allowing the rule to be met over the new economic cycle (see chart).
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An IMF study in 2009, by Marco Terrones and Thomas Helbling, concluded that the biggest cause of the switch from a global current-account deficit to a surplus was mismeasurement of services.
If China's economy continues to overheat, its current-account surplus could soon turn to deficit, and then its central bank would no longer need to buy American Treasuries to hold down its currency.
If they had been doing what good Keynesian policy demanded of them then, paying down the debt, running a budget surplus instead of the 3-4% deficit they were running, then we could be good Keynesians now and could borrow our way out of the current slump and do some fiscal stimulus.
In both, a crisis of excess debt developed, in the 1920s created by war and today by a decade in which the new common currency generated huge financial flows from Germany and other surplus countries to deficit countries of the euro-zone periphery.
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Thailand, whose whopping current-account deficit helped trigger the turmoil, is now running a monthly current-account surplus.
The new interim chief executive of the NHS, Sir Ian Carruthers, who is replacing Sir Nigel Crisp, is currently in charge of two health authorities - one predicting a deficit and one a surplus.
The Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister company to The Economist, expects China to move to a current-account deficit in 2001, after years of surplus.
Thanks to this innovation, over the years the social-security deficit was first checked and then turned into surplus in the three years from 1999.
With growth in the euro-zone roughly on a par with the 3-3.5% forecast for the United States, and with the euro-zone's trade surplus a stark contrast to the Americans' deficit, the euro is due for a correction.
Johnson Matthey sees the palladium market in surplus by 725, 000 ounces in 2011, compared to a 530, 000-ounces deficit in 2010.
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Despite a long history as a huge exporter of commodities, Indonesia has flipped from having a trade account surplus to a deficit in recent months, and last quarter recorded its biggest ever current-account deficit.
One reason why this system cannot go on much longer is that Asia's crisis of 1997-98 put the budget deeply into deficit and, unaided, it may not return to surplus.
In early October the Treasury released a pre-election economic and fiscal update indicating that after 14 years in surplus the budget balance was set to slip into deficit.
Both surplus and deficit countries would benefit if there was a more balanced program in which the surplus countries were focused on internal demand, there was a more market-based approach to the currencies, and the deficit countries thereby were able to export more -- and that would also make it easier for them to deal with their unemployment issues.
WHITEHOUSE: President Obama and President Yudhoyono Press Availability | The White House
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