Abstract
Recently, economists have been focusing much of their attention on a particular issue which seems to be a cause for concern in many countries, namely the US current account deficit. The current account is, along with the financial account and the capital account, part of a country's Balance of Payments, a document recording this country's international trade in goods and services and its international borrowing and lending. The current account consists of three elements (the trade account, the income account and the transfer account), but it is commonly defined as the difference between a country's exports and its imports. A current account deficit thus means that a country imports more than it exports. This has been the case for the United States for several periods in its history, including the past fifteen years, the US current account deficit has indeed grown steadily since 1991 and this situation has been raising much concern lately, probably because the deficit had never reached such a level before. The US current account deficit represents today about 800 billion dollars, that is to say nearly 7% of the US Gross Domestic Product. Economists thus fear the possible consequences (in the United States but also in the whole world) of such a deficit in the world's most powerful economy and therefore try to suggest possible solutions. And the best way to find solutions to a problem is to first identify the causes for it. I will put forward some hypotheses concerning the causes for the increase in the US current account deficit in the first part, and identify the possible consequences of such a phenomenon in the second part.
