Since the mid-1990’s, the net current-account surplus of “all the rest” has risen by an amount that one Federal Reserve Bank economist has put at $450 billion a year, not because savings rates have increased, but because investment rates have fallen. Declining investment rates in Japan, the newly-industrializing Asian economies, and Latin America, in that order of importance, have fueled the flood of savings into US government bonds, US mortgage-backed securities, and US equity-backed loans – the capital-account equivalent of America’s enormous trade deficit.