Daily Inspiration Quote by David Korten

"Money flows into the US, and inflates US assets, and allows the US to have a monstrous trade deficit. That means we are consuming more than we are producing"

David Korten, Activist

About this Quote

Korten is doing something sly here: he translates a technical macroeconomic story into a moral ledger. “Money flows into the US” is framed like an invasive tide, not a neutral market outcome. The verbs do the work. Capital doesn’t “invest” or “allocate”; it “inflates” assets and “allows” a “monstrous” deficit, language that casts finance as an enabler of indulgence rather than a tool for growth.

The intent is to puncture the comforting narrative that foreign capital is a vote of confidence in America. In Korten’s telling, inflows aren’t proof of strength; they’re the fuel for an economy that can postpone accountability. Asset inflation is the middle step: money bids up stocks and real estate, creating paper wealth and political calm, while the trade deficit becomes the external symptom of an internal bargain - consumption now, production later, if ever.

Subtext: this isn’t really about trade balances. It’s about power and who benefits. Asset inflation rewards people who already own assets; it’s a quiet upward transfer dressed as national prosperity. “Monstrous” signals an activist’s alarm at the scale, but also at the normalization: deficits become background noise as long as portfolios rise.

Contextually, Korten fits a post-1990s critique of globalization and financialization, where the US dollar’s reserve status and safe-haven appeal pull in capital, keep borrowing cheap, and let policymakers avoid hard choices about industrial capacity, wages, and inequality. He’s arguing that the imbalance is structural - and that the bill arrives not as a single crash, but as a slow erosion of productive backbone.

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Topic	Money
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David Korten is a Activist from USA.

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