fiscal

In November, soon after France and Belgium were forced to pump another 5.5 billion euros into bailed out lender Dexia, the ratings agency Moody's stripped France of its AAA sovereign debt rating. The interesting bit was that Moody's…

Of all of the elements of the US fiscal cliff, the most damaging from a consumer perspective is likely to be the increase in payroll taxes as it hits a broad swathe of consumers in the middle class. This was confirmed today via the release…

The US trade figures for Q4 2012 came out this morning and they surprised analysts by showing a trade deficit that shrank 21% to $38.5 billion in December. According to Bloomberg News this was a lower deficit than any of 73 economists…

According to Greece's finance ministry, Greece's government was able to record its first primary surplus in years. This is a measure of a budget based on revenue minus expenditure excluding interest costs and is commonly thought of a…

My thesis these past few years is that a fiscal retrenchment to reduce deficits in the US was likely to lead to a shortened business cycle. I have been saying since 2013 began that politics favoured the United States going into austerity…

As you may have heard already, the jobs numbers for the US came out and they confirmed that the US private sector continues to create 150-200,000 new jobs each month. This is consistent with moderate and does not indicate any signs of…

As I have been predicting since the beginning of the year, I believe the Republicans will be able to force through some form of austerity before the budget battles in Washington are over this quarter. As the year began, we saw the fiscal…

Although the House GOP leadership has been divided on how to deal with the upcoming fiscal contests, they have apparently decided to raise the debt ceiling and focus on the sequester as I have predicted.

Yesterday, I wrote why a US fiscal standoff should mean recession in Q2. As an adjunct to that, I wanted to add a few words about the political process on how we get the standoff to a government shutdown and recession.

Last Tuesday I said then that the debt ceiling fight would come first but that default on US public debt would be a step too far - and so Republicans would capitulate, forcing them to put their efforts into the sequester cuts. The biggest…