Current Accounts - food for the high information voter

There is a surplus of information for the low information voter in the form of sound bites and partisan rallying cries. Adding my own chants does nothing for the larger populace and irritates some of the locals. Thus I have decided to feed the high information voter in hopes they will develop their own stories. This may make your head hurt.

Current Accounts is econspeak for difference of exports and imports. If it is positive, that is we export more than we import, goods and services are flowing out and money is flowing in. It hasn't been positive for a while. It has been sufficiently negative to alarm people like T Boone Pickens.

"As imports grow and world prices rise, the amount of money we send to foreign nations every year is soaring. At current oil prices, we will send $700 billion dollars out of the country this year alone — that's four times the annual cost of the Iraq war.  Projected over the next 10 years the cost will be $10 trillion — it will be the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind."

Now T Boone Pickens has the aura of a prophet speaking truth, but the website does not cite its references nor does it place its numbers in context. That exercise if left to us. There is plenty of commentary on the web but that leads to "he said, "she said".

THe IMF (International Monetary Fund) sits on a mountain of data but they want $2300 to let you access it, free to people in developing countries. We may be heading there but we aren't there today. Fortunately, our own government provides US information free and does so in a open and accessible manner.

The data I am after is available in multiple forms but working in a spreadsheet permits you to make time series comparisons. So we can start with - http://www.bea.gov/international/xls/table1.xls

Historical trends are fascinating but there is some reason to focus on the past few years and somewhat arbitrarily I have chosen 2000-2006.  All numbers are in billions, seasonally adjusted where possible.

Trade Balance Goods: -455    -430    -485    -551    -670    -787    -838

Public Debt : 5674, 5807, 6228, 6783, 7379, 7933, 8507

Mortgage Debt:  6796, 7486, 8364, 9369, 10672, 12134, 13306

Consumer Debt:  1722, 1872, 1984, 2088, 2202, 2296, 2405

My take is that trade balance is the elephant in the room, mortgage debt is feeding the elephant and we're running out of grass.