The mystery of the missing money, part 1

Those with the patience to pore over balance of payments data occasionally get rewarded with surprising nuggets of insight.

As a case in point, a new note from Deutsche Bank points us to the mysteries contained in the “net errors and omissions” category. In theory, mistakes that occur each quarter should cancel each other out. In many places, however, summing up these flows up over time produces distinctly non-random patterns — what Deutsche Bank calls “dark matter”.