Today's trade report wasn't a record, but the January gap between imports and exports was close.  Here's a nice summary from our Canadian friends at CBC News:

The U.S. trade deficit climbed to $58.3 billion US in January, the second-highest level in history...

For all of last year, the U.S. trade gap surged by 24.3 per cent to $617.1 billion, setting a record for the third straight year...

The January deficit reflected a 0.4 per cent rise in exports of goods and services, which climbed to a record high of $100.8 billion, demonstrating record sales of industrial supplies and U.S. cars and auto parts.

However, imports rose at an even faster pace of 1.9 per cent in January, climbing to an all-time high of $159.1 billion. ..

As usual, the largest deficit with a single country was recorded with China, an imbalance of $15.3 billion, the third-biggest imbalance on record and up seven per cent from December.

After China, the United States recorded a record $6.15-billion deficit with Canada, the country's biggest trading partner, and a $6.21-billion deficit with Japan.

The deficit with the 25-country European Union was $8.1 billion, down from a December deficit of $10.3 billion.

This is getting to be pretty familiar news by now, but yesterday Fed Governor Ben Bernanke put an interesting spin on things in a speech given to the Virginia Association of Economics:

I will take issue with the common view that the recent deterioration in the U.S. current account primarily reflects economic policies and other economic developments within the United States itself. Although domestic developments have certainly played a role, I will argue that a satisfying explanation of the recent upward climb of the U.S. current account deficit requires a global perspective that more fully takes into account events outside the United States. To be more specific, I will argue that over the past decade a combination of diverse forces has created a significant increase in the global supply of saving--a global saving glut--which helps to explain both the increase in the U.S. current account deficit and the relatively low level of long-term real interest rates in the world today.

Governor Bernanke offers the view that low saving rates in the U.S. are actually the endogenous response of economic developments in other countries.

That inadequate U.S. national saving is the source of the current account deficit must be true at some level; indeed, the statement is almost a tautology. However, linking current-account developments to the decline in saving begs the question of why U.S. saving has declined. In particular, although the decline in U.S. saving may reflect changes in household behavior or economic policy in the United States, it may also be in some part a reaction to events external to the United States...

In fact, this is what Bernanke believes the story to be.  He points, of course, to developing countries as the prime drivers, and gives a nod to export-market-motivated exchange rate policies that are at the heart of the Bretton Woods II hypothesis.  But more space is given over to another simple (presumably complementary) explanation for the capital-account behavior of developing countries-- they screwed up, and had to fix it.

In my view, a key reason for the change in the current account positions of developing countries is the series of financial crises those countries experienced in the past decade or so. In the mid-1990s, most developing countries were net importers of capital... in 1996 emerging Asia and Latin America borrowed about $80 billion on net on world capital markets. These capital inflows were not always productively used...

In response to these crises, emerging-market nations either chose or were forced into new strategies for managing international capital flows. In general, these strategies involved shifting from being net importers of financial capital to being net exporters, in some cases very large net exporters...

Countries in the region that had escaped the worst effects of the crisis but remained concerned about future crises, notably China, also built up reserves. These "war chests" of foreign reserves have been used as a buffer against potential capital outflows...

Why was U.S. disproportionately on the receiving end of these capital outflows?  Bernanke touches on the relative strength of the U.S. economy, the role of the dollar as a reserve currency, and all that, but he also makes this interesting observation.

Most interesting, however, is that the experience of the United States in recent years is not so nearly unique among industrial countries as one might think initially... a number of key industrial countries other than the United States have seen their current accounts move substantially toward deficit since 1996, including France, Italy, Spain, Australia, and the United Kingdom.

Governor Bernanke is not completely sanguine about these developments -- he expresses some concern, for example, that the investment supported by these capital inflows are being channeled into residential housing rather than business fixed investment, and generally endorses progress on restraining our fiscal deficits.  But he does serve up an antidote to the we-gotta-do-something-quick perspective...

... as I have argued today, some of the key reasons for the large U.S. current account deficit are external to the United States, implying that purely inward-looking policies are unlikely to resolve this issue.

and joins up with us soft-landing scenarists.

... the pace at which emerging-market countries are accumulating international reserves should slow as they increasingly perceive their reserves to be adequate and as they move toward more flexible exchange rates. The factors underlying the U.S. current account deficit are likely to unwind only gradually, however. Thus, 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.

UPDATE: St. Louis Fed president William Poole touches on the "differential demographics" theme in this speech.

UPDATE II:  Calculated Risk agrees with the Governor, but is considerably less optimistic.