F. George McDuffee writes:
Several people have indicated the Current Accounts Ballance of
Payments [trade] deficit was meaningless.

Among other problems, accumulation of U.S. dollars allows the
purchase of U.S. companies, and the transfer of U.S. jobs. See
Reuters article below for details of how the jobs at Maytag were
traded for cheap imports. Another example is the sale by IBM of
their line of personal computers.

And the doomsayers were saying this about Japan when a Japanese
businessman bought pebble beach in the 80's. He
subsequently sold it back to an American consoritium for a
significant loss.

scott

(Note that quoting an entire article from reuters is not considered
fair use. An excerpt, yes, but for the entire article you should have
just included a URL.)