If you go to the BEA website (http://www.bea.gov) and look at the Survey of Current Business for July 2013, the table on “U.S. International Transactions,” you will find that in 2012, U.S. income...

If you go to the BEA website (http://www.bea.gov) and look at the Survey of Current Business for July 2013, the table on “U.S. International Transactions,” you will find that in 2012, U.S. income receipts on its foreign assets were $770.1 billion (line 13), while the country’s payments on liabilities to foreigners were $537.8 billion (line 30). Yet we saw in this chapter that the United States is a substantial net debtor to foreigners. How, then, is it possible that the United States received more foreign asset income than it paid out?