fiscal

Josh Barro has written a very comprehensive post at Bloomberg analsying Mitt Romney's tax plan. His conclusion is that the plan is mathematically impossible, leading one to assume that a President Romney would have to break his pledge on…

I actually thought about doing the daily on the Wells Fargo fraud 'without fraudsters' meme because it really captures the problem with regulation of our financial system but that is a policy issue. Instead, I want to focus on a macro…

Two months ago, we got four scenarios for the fiscal cliff via Credit Suisse and Sober Look. All of these scenarios called for at least a 0.9% drag on the economy, meaning that we should fully expect at least a 0.9% drop in annualized GDP…

Now, we come to the Spanish budget. The austerity here is a lot more real than it is in the French budget. As I have been saying for a number of weeks, the goal of the Spanish government is to present an austerity budget that gets approval…

I am going to use two news sources here, Liberation and L'Expansion to dissect the proposed 2013 French budget, which was released earlier today. France is significant because, along with Germany, it represented the pre-crisis axis around…

I participated in a Euromoney conference on investing in inflation this afternoon. I was on a panel of five right before the closing remarks by keynote speaker Dennis Gartman and I wanted to make a few remarks about what I learned. First,…

This is a brief follow-on to the last post on whether we should be optimistic, in particular now that the US housing market is improving. If you think about it, the problem now is that all debtors - public and private - are taking the…

Japan has joined the crowd and started an even more aggressive asset purchase program as the Japanese economy weakens. Meanwhile, serious tax hikes are poised to go into effect very soon. Japan plans to cut state spending because the…

I was on RT's Capital Account on Friday night talking to Lauren Lyster about QE and the conversation moved more into the realm of fiat currency and government's coercive taxing power. This is particularly relevant given arguments within…

The following press release was issued by Moody's Investors Service earlier today regarding the United States. New York, September 11, 2012 -- Budget negotiations during the 2013 Congressional legislative session will likely determine the…