Treasury, the Federal Reserve, Wall Street, and the IMF. Its chief beneficiaries are U.S. investment and commercial banks and the rest of the Fortune 500. No fewer than 244 of the world's top 500 companies are now American. The electronic herd is not some creature of the Internet; the currency in which it deals is the dollar, and it is its access to dollar capital that gives it power. And it is not simply capitalist values that are being transmitted to the globe; it is American capitalist values.

When Friedman urges his readers to support globalization, he does so in the same spirit in which U.S. liberals argued for the Marshall Plan, the Bretton Woods institutions, open U.S. markets, and U.S. military protection after the war. It is partthe Delphic utterance is legendary, has allowed himself to publicly muse that perhaps the U.S. economy has invented new rules and broached new frontiers. The view of the United States as an exceptional civilization is validated once again.

casual inspection of the numbers forces any independent analyst to come to a more balanced view. The U.S. boom has a soft underbelly; the astonishing trade deficit is set to climb to 4 percent of GDP, which is the driver of an amazing deterioration in the United States' international balance sheet. This economic superpower has growing foreign debts. The reason this does not emerge as a constraint on policy is simple. The dollar, at least until the launch of the euro this year, is the sole world currency. The rest of