Word: surpluses
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...likely to get worse. This is largely because the country's spectacular economic boom is driven by a self-sustaining flywheel of rapid productivity gains and increasing profits, which generates excess capital that is in turn invested in more manufacturing capacity. This is why the country's trade surplus with the rest of the world has been rising at an alarming pace, growing nearly 50% to a record $262 billion last year (although the trade gap narrowed in the final three months of 2007). Because many Chinese companies are awash with cash, traditional policies aimed at slowing investment growth, such...
...away in 1983 when a bipartisan gang led by Senators Bob Dole and Daniel Patrick Moynihan cracked heads and persuaded Congress to move up some already planned payroll-tax hikes and shove back the full retirement age to 67 for future generations. Since then, Social Security has run a surplus. From an actuarial standpoint, this mostly solved the problem of funding the boomers' retirement. It also meant that the boomers will, as a group, put more into Social Security than they get out. (That's true of all age cohorts born since 1937; it's the Social Security recipients born...
...catch is that the surplus was invested in U.S. government bonds, to be cashed in later to keep the by-then-elderly boomers afloat. These bonds are simply claims on future U.S. taxpayers, and they're coming due. The Social Security surplus peaked in 2000, at 0.91% of GDP. It has held steady for the past couple of years but is expected to start shrinking fast in 2011. By 2017, Social Security should begin to run a deficit, one that's projected to grow sharply through the mid-2030s...
...reason for that is clear enough. At a time of extreme stress in global-equity and credit markets, many governments have surplus foreign exchange to play with--and because of the falling U.S. dollar, they are increasingly interested in investing their cash where it can earn greater returns than it would from U.S. Treasury debt, the traditional haven. The largest SWFs--the so-called Super Seven, comprising China, Russia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Norway and two Singapore funds--control up to $1.8 trillion. By 2011, assets held by SWFs worldwide are projected to grow almost fourfold, to nearly $8 trillion...
Canada and the U.S. are each other's top economic partners, with two-way trade valued at $625.9 billion. Normally, Canada's exports significantly outpace imports, but in September the country's trade surplus with the U.S. dwindled to $6.2 billion, according to Statistics Canada. The main reason is that the automotive sector, which includes cars, trucks and parts, posted monthly deficits from April to September...