U.S. Posts Best Trade Figures in Nearly 6 Years : Trade: The shrinking deficit is attributed to the dollar’s rising value. But the red ink may stay at a high level through the ‘90s.

The United States recorded its best trade performance in almost six years from July through September as the deficit in the broadest measure of trade shrank 29% to $22.69 billion, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday.

The Commerce Department said the current account deficit narrowed by $9.4 billion from a second-quarter imbalance of $32.08 billion, reflecting a big jump in the overseas earnings of U.S. companies.

But economists discounted the huge swing, saying it did nothing to change their view that America’s trade deficit will remain stuck at a high level through most of the next decade.

The current account, also known as the balance of payments, is the most important trade statistic because it measures not only trade in merchandise but also trade in services, the category that includes investment earnings between countries.

For the third quarter, the services category registered a surplus of $8.72 billion after posting a $1.66-billion deficit from April through June, the first services deficit in three decades.

But the services swing from deficit to surplus was attributed almost totally to changes in the value of the dollar. In the third quarter, the dollar was declining, meaning that the profits U.S. companies earn in foreign currencies were worth more when they were translated into dollars.

In the second quarter, a rising dollar had eaten into the profits Americans companies were earning in foreign currencies.

The big swing in services helped offset a small increase in the merchandise trade deficit, which climbed 0.7% to $27.75 billion in the third quarter, and a rise in foreign aid and pension payments, the other category of the current account, which climbed to $3.66 billion, an increase of 27%.

Analysts forecast that the merchandise trade deficit will remain at stubbornly high levels in coming years and predicted that the services account will dip permanently into deficit sometime early in the 1990s, reflecting the fact that the United States is now the world’s largest debtor nation.

As residents of a debtor nation, Americans hold less in overseas assets than foreigners hold in U.S. assets. America’s net debtor position stood at $532.5 billion at the end of last year and is expected to worsen by an additional $100 billion this year.

That means that more and more U.S. wealth must be transferred into foreign hands in the form of interest payments and profits earned by foreign companies doing business in the United States.

“The net debtor number is clearly moving in the wrong direction,” said David Wyss, an economist with DRI-McGraw Hill. “We are still borrowing money from overseas, and that means that our interest payments to foreigners will be going up.”

At the start of this decade, the United States was running surpluses in its current account because earnings from American investments abroad were enough to offset perennial deficits in merchandise trade.

But as Americans transferred billions of dollars into foreign hands to pay for merchandise imports, the investment cushion shrank rapidly and disappeared altogether in 1985.