"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"
About this Quote
Bureaucratic repetition is doing the real work here. Solomon stacks "current account", "balance of payments", "trade account", then circles back to "other current accounts, current account items" like a lecturer riffling through a filing cabinet mid-sentence. The clunkiness reads less like a mistake than a demonstration: the language we use to describe economic life is often so procedural that it can blur into self-parody. By the time he lands on "current account items", the phrase has been stripped of intuitive meaning and turned into pure category.
The specific intent is to mark something as routine: "as usual" frames the U.S. deficit not as an emergency but as a recurring feature of American economic posture. That casualness matters. It suggests an educator talking to students or policy-minded readers who have heard the alarm bells before and need to see the deficit placed in the taxonomy of accounts, not in the theater of headlines.
The subtext is twofold. First, the United States is being treated as structurally dependent on importing more than it exports, financed by capital inflows and the dollar's privileged role. Second, the very act of naming all the sub-accounts hints at how easy it is for debates to hide inside accounting terms: the politics of deindustrialization, consumerism, and global imbalances can be laundered into sterile bookkeeping.
Contextually, coming from a mid-to-late 20th century educator, it fits an era when U.S. external deficits became familiar background noise, and the challenge was explaining why "deficit" didn't automatically mean national decline, even if it did signal vulnerabilities.
The specific intent is to mark something as routine: "as usual" frames the U.S. deficit not as an emergency but as a recurring feature of American economic posture. That casualness matters. It suggests an educator talking to students or policy-minded readers who have heard the alarm bells before and need to see the deficit placed in the taxonomy of accounts, not in the theater of headlines.
The subtext is twofold. First, the United States is being treated as structurally dependent on importing more than it exports, financed by capital inflows and the dollar's privileged role. Second, the very act of naming all the sub-accounts hints at how easy it is for debates to hide inside accounting terms: the politics of deindustrialization, consumerism, and global imbalances can be laundered into sterile bookkeeping.
Contextually, coming from a mid-to-late 20th century educator, it fits an era when U.S. external deficits became familiar background noise, and the challenge was explaining why "deficit" didn't automatically mean national decline, even if it did signal vulnerabilities.
Quote Details
| Topic | Money |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Robert
Add to List
