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America’s Bills Start Coming Due
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America’s Bills Start Coming Due

Our Correspondent
Nov 19, 2007
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America’s Bills Start Coming Due
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For most of recorded history, nations have paid for their imports with exports. When a nation runs a trade deficit and instead pays for imports with its own currency, it in effect issues an IOU to the seller to buy an exported good at a future date. China today holds US$1.3 trillion of those IOUs, much of them from the United States.

After all, despite t…

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