deficit

All US government obligations are substantially identical promises to repay a specific amount of the currency unit of account backed by nothing but taxing authority. So, Treasury bonds don’t ‘fund’ anything. If the Treasury were allowed to…

The jobs numbers in the US were weak. There was no change in non-farm payrolls. Unemployment was unchanged from July at 9.1%. Underemployment was 16.2%. Total revisions to previous months’ data were –58,000, meaning the number today was…

An excerpt from the August 1932 Republican Nomination Acceptance Speech by Herbert Hoover and commentary about his policy choices and ours today

The fact that Italy's 5-year CDS prices remain elevated (376 now vs 388 on Aug 4 peak) warns that ECB bond buying, fiscal austerity has not convinced private sector investors that the worst is truly past. This offers a poor backdrop from…

Former Fed nominee and Nobel Laureate Peter Diamond spoke to Bloomberg News about how he sees the economic difficulties the United States faces. His view is that America faces a jobs crisis in the here and now and that deficit reduction is…

This is a brief follow-up to my post yesterday proclaiming that this is looking more like Hoover every day. Credit Writedowns reader Greg came across the statement below. Who said it, Herbert Hoover or Barack Obama?

Forget about ‘pivoting’ to jobs when right now the President is going to be forced to focus on deficits. The House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has already said he will broker no stimulus and the deficit panel will be in full swing before…

I appreciate the role that Krugman plays. Like many of you, I enjoy reading his blogs and more often than not, I agree with him. He is almost the lone, sane, voice in a position of authority who argues against the standard deficit…

It is far from clear that the current level of Estonian CDS prices risk in in any more satisfactory way than they did at the height of the crisis, since membership of the Eurozone has brought with it both positives and negatives. The 0.28%…

Last summer I wrote a post clarifying some points that I have learned about Modern Monetary Theory. The genesis of the post was a gross mischaracterization of Modern Money Theory (MMT) by Paul Krugman in a piece called “I Would Do Anything…