fiscal

As the New Year begins, there are four events that are creating significant headwinds for the US economy. There has been a lot of talk about the fiscal cliff in the press but behind this is the debate over the US debt ceiling, which will be…

The weekly post on Monday was on the new Japanese LDP Prime Minister Abe's threat to strip the Bank of Japan of its independence as a central bank. The thrust of his threat goes to  the integration of monetary and fiscal policy to create a…

Greetings to you all on Christmas Eve. I think the big deal today is not America or Europe, but Japan. The incoming Japanese Prime Minister is threatening to strip the Bank of Japan, the central bank, of its independence. What Mr. Abe said…

According to Stan Collender, the chance that the US goes over the fiscal cliff is now at least 75%. This rhymes with what I have been saying all along. I would put the number at 90%. The US will NOT get all of the line items to prevent the…

Here's a very good video on MMT with Stephanie Kelton, the chair of the Economics department at the University of Missouri at Kansas City talking to Lauren Lyster of RT's Capital Account. As you know, despite my Austrian bias and my…

According to recent estimates by Goldman Sachs, the US economy is already at stall speed, with GDP growth for Q4 expected to be an anemic 1%. Any further cuts to growth beyond this due to the fiscal cliff in 2013 would cause a recession.…

By Sober Look As discussed earlier (see post), US manufacturing data for November shows shrinking inventories. This is true for both the ISM survey ... ISM Inventories index (source: ISM) as well as the Markit PMI index: US Markit…

The real takeaway, however, is that the solution to the fiscal cliff problem involves some combination of tax increases and federal spending cuts. To the extent that at least some of it is front-loaded into 2013, which is likely, the result…

Yesterday the ISM Manufacturing Report on Business came out and it showed a large decline in the US manufacturing sector. The headline PMI number of 49.5% means that the US manufacturing sector is below the 50% threshold that separates…

By Marc Chandler This Great Graphic that shows that deficit reduction in the US over the past three years is largest in more than 60 years.  I found it at the Investor's Business Daily, which of course, is  not known for its leftist…