…comes to us courtesy of the National Post’s Terence Corcoran. After mentioning the ‘massive’ US trade deficit and ‘the current fashionable concerns about global financial imbalances’, he drops the following clanger:

It’s not good enough to stay the course:

But what’s to be done about it?

In a final sentence, he seemed to be advocating a radical policy initiative.

"We probably have little choice except to be patient as we work to create the conditions in which a greater share of global saving can be redirected away from the United States and toward the rest of the world — particularly the developing nations."

That sounds like a prescription for strange policy from a U.S. Fed chairman — one aimed at pushing investment "away from" the greatest economic engine in the world.

Now, not everyone has to understand the relationship between trade flows and investment flows. But you’d hope that an economics columnist at a national newspaper would make the effort to try.