Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"Well, indeed there is. When you buy an import like you are buying a new Japanese TV, you are obviously sending U.S. dollars out of the country. You are sending those dollars to Japan, but Japan is a country that doesn't use dollars, they use their own currency. They use the yen. So eventually what's going to happen is the holders of those U.S. dollars are going to say, 'Well, we don't want them just sitting around, we want to earn some money on those. So what we are going to do is, we're going to go take them back to the U.S. and invest them. We are going to buy something with them, or we're going to build something in the U.S. Something we can spend dollars on and hopefully get a good return.' So you might find that those Japanese owners of U.S. dollars will buy some U.S. stock or some bonds or some real estate. Or they may decide to set up some factories, build some factories in the U.S. Of course, if they do, that creates jobs, and it creates income in the U.S. So what's changed here is ownership. When we buy an import, effectively down the road, what we will do to pay for that import is to sell off some asset, some part of ownership of U.S. assets, and that's the way the exchange actually takes place."