Over the course of this year, China's government will find itself with more than $300 billion in new foreign-currency reserves, mostly dollars, that it will have to park somewhere. That's in addition to more than $1 trillion already in the bank. The oil-exporting countries of the world are in a similar predicament, with a trillion petrodollars looking for a home. Japan's got a trillion bucks lying around too.
This is the flip side of the gargantuan trade deficits ($765 billion last year) that the U.S. is running, the result of high oil prices, Asian manufacturing prowess and our spend-and-borrow mentality. That...