David Korten Quotes

To finance this trade deficit, the U.S. has to borrow from the rest of the world or sell American assets like stocks, businesses, and real estate to the rest of the world.

The trade deficit is the capital surplus and don't ever think of having a capital surplus as being a bad thing for our country.

In short, both experience and economic theory imply that the US could now t to a more competitive dollar without experiencing either increased inflation or decreased economic growth.

When I work with countries struggling to pay for budgets or finance trade deficits, I reflect on how Americans do not spend a moment considering the unique advantages of being able to issue bonds and print money freely.

Unless the trade deficit shrinks, the combination of the trade deficit and the interest and dividend payments to foreigners will grow ever more rapidly.

Well, the U.S., of course, is the world's largest economy. It's about a quarter of the world's output. It's also home to many of the largest financial institutions and financial markets.

I was quite ready to accept certain restrictions on the United States. After all, there was a great dollar shortage. It was quite clear that the more prosperous Europe became, the more business there would be in the United States.

We aren't leveraging this great economic engine, the strongest economy in the world. And yet we have this totally weak response. We import $500 billion a year more in products than we export.

The more competitive value of the dollar turned around the trade deficit.

It is not repeated large Emissions [printing] of a base Paper-Currency, but our Imports exceeding our Exports, that occasions Silver to be ship'd off in Ballance

U.S. capital formation, which has been pretty high in the '90s and very high in the late 1990s, is what is being financed by the savings of the rest of the world, generally poorer than ourselves, because our deficit on current account, chronic deficit, is their surplus, and they have been willingly bringing that to the American market.

Chinese experts noted that the U.S. economy has rebounded from the 2008 crash more strongly than some analysts here had expected, while China's own growth is slowing after several decades of rocket-ship acceleration.

Every dollar a foreigner spends over here directly subtracts a dollar from the trade deficit.

GDP simply measures the circulation of money in the economy, not whether or not the outcome of using that money is positive or negative.

The United States lived on borrowed money for too long, inflating its financial sector unnecessarily and neglecting its small and mid-sized industrial companies.

The most important initiative you could take to improve the world economy would be to stabilize the dollar-euro rate.

The United States as usual has a sizable deficit in the current account of its balance of payments, trade account and other current accounts, current account items.

My theme this evening is that America needs a competitive dollar.

With a strong domestic economy, low national unemployment at 5 percent, and increasing retail sales, the picture should look rosy. But one look at the trade deficit changes all of that.

Japan rose from the ashes of World War II as a 'trading state,' the model for export-led growth. It is not clear that the old export model of growth will be sustainable in a more 'balanced' global economy that does not rely so heavily on the U.S. consumer.

Well, the U.S. is running a current account deficit; we are creating lots of investment opportunities in the United States that exceed our own domestic savings rates, so the issue here is to encourage higher savings rates in the United States.

A weak currency is the sign of a weak economy, and a weak economy leads to a weak nation.

America knows it has got to deal with its deficit problems so that it, too, can promise it is making its proper and best contributions to the world economy.

Nonetheless, the developing countries must be able to reap the benefits of international trade.

I actually think that the economy has got some positives. It's got the market. It's got consumer confidence and it's got banks throwing - I mean central bankers throwing money at it around the world.