The whole key to that article is the question of who is financing the account deficit. If one looks at Mexico and Canada, one sees three strong second/third-tier economies which, although stable, cannot seem to harden their currencies versus the dollar The value that these countries create, particularly Mexico, has to be going somewhere and one has to believe that it is going into the dollar-denominated credit system, thus strengthening the dollar. More peripheral third-world countries have it even worse. To look at the rand, you'd think the South Africans do no work, never pay their bills and produce nothing. Meanwhile, they're the largest economy in Africa. Then you have the trade in contraband - that's got to be traded mostly in dollars, particularly now that d-marks have to be cashed in. You've got to suspect that the worldwide demand for U.S. cash strengthens the dollar. I don't think those trends are likely to change.
Unless the euro really explodes as an international currency (and does so to the detriment of the dollar, which is another matter), the global currency will remain the dollar (possibly increasingly so) and in that case we can't imagine that the dollar's current account is defined by the US borders, can we?.
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