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The article discusses America's current-account deficit and a prediction that the dollar will decline sharply. The dollar's latest slide seems to have been triggered by uncertainty about the presidential election and a flurry of comments from Fed officials. The dollar has fallen by over 30% against the euro since 2001, but its trade-weighted index has fallen by much less because of heavy intervention by Asian central banks, aimed at holding down their currencies against the dollar. Some economists argue that America can sustain its large current-account deficit for at least another decade, without a sharp fall in the dollar, because it will be happily financed by China and other Asian countries. In a series of papers Michael Dooley, David Folkerts-Landau and Peter Garber at Deutsche Bank have argued that the present arrangements resemble a revived Bretton Woods, the system of fixed exchange rates after the second world war. Currency intervention by Asian central banks helps to explain why America has so far been able to finance its deficit without higher American bond yields or a bigger fall in the dollar. George Magnus, an economist at UBS, argues that the parallels with Bretton Woods are superficial. One big difference is that in the 1960s the United States ran a current-account surplus and was a net creditor to the rest of the world. Today, America is the world's biggest debtor, which could undermine the dollar's role as an anchor currency. Another important difference is that, unlike under the Bretton Woods regime, most Asian countries have scrapped capital controls or where they still exist, as in China, they are leaky. Under Bretton Woods there was no real alternative to the dollar as a reserve currency. Today there is the euro, into which Asians could diversify.

The author claims that Asian central banks have prevented the U.S. dollar from falling even more dramatically than it has in recent months, but warns that Asian banks may seek to diversify their holdings. The dollar did pop up briefly on December 9th, after the Bank of Japan apparently intervened to stop the yen rising, but the Japanese central bank has already spent some $168 billion on dollars this year, and the yen has climbed by 11% against the American currency. Perhaps the yen would have risen by more had the Bank of Japan spent less: this week the euro was up by 42% from its lowest point against the dollar and sterling was at its highest since being ejected from Europe's exchange-rate mechanism in 1992. The dollar has been weakening even as America's economy has been picking up sharply. The health of the economy may now be part of the dollar's problem. Americans save so little that their spending must be financed by foreigners, which is why the country's current-account deficit has been rising so swiftly, to half a trillion dollars or so. Until recently, this foreign investment was largely of a private nature; however, as concerns about the scale of the deficit have mounted, private flows have dried up somewhat and central banks have been topping up the stream. Jim O'Neill, Goldman's chief economist, thinks that central banks will increasingly wake up to the benefits of diversification.