America was now a deficit country but was nothing like any other deficit country. ‘Normal’ deficit countries, such as France, Greece or India, had to borrow dollars to shore up their currency and to raise interest rates domestically to stop money outflows. America did not need to do any of that. It had, in other words, found the magic formula every empire had hitherto only dreamed of: how to persuade wealthy foreigners, and foreign central banks, voluntarily to finance simultaneously its government and its imports!
