fiscal

As Mr Zapatero put it on Saturday, when he announced the date of Spain’s general election, the decision “is in the country’s interest” since from now on there will be certainty, and “certainty is stability”. While it is quite possible that…

Michael Hudson and William Hartung make the argument that military spending was exempted from cuts in the debt ceiling deal because it had strong backers who protected it. They also reveal that the US debt ceiling was put into place to keep…

The normal case—let us say, in the US or the UK or Japan—is that anything for sale is for sale in the domestic currency. These sovereign governments never find that they cannot buy something by issuing their own currency. However, the…

The signal we’re extracting from the weekly move of the Four Horsemen is that though concern and the lack of confidence in the U.S. over the debt ceiling issue has increased, other factors, such as the deflationary consequences of a large…

The Hungarian government’s much publicised unorthodox plans to cut the country’s public debt level has been attracting a lot of attention of late, both from the media and from the rating agencies. Some observers have been quite positively…

Procyclicality is fine for states as a constraint despite how they exacerbate the swings in the business cycle, creating deadweight losses. The federal government can always counter this pro-cyclicality and smooth out the cycle. This is one…

If you recall, it was George W. Bush’s father, GWH Bush, who, when campaigning against Reagan, called supply side economics’ claims that tax cuts pay for themselves Voodoo Economics. And Bush was proved right when deficits spiralled out of…

Last week the NY Times covered the division within the economic community over the way out of the USA's overspending / balance budgeting. “Reasonable people can sit down and, apart from any political or policy motivations, come up…

Comstock Partners argues that while the stock market seems ready cheer any agreement that increases the debt ceiling and avoids a default, such cheering may be extremely short-lived as the economy sinks further under the burden of…

If you are an investor, businessperson or employee, what you care about is outcomes. You want to know what’s likely to happen in the economy and in the markets. That is what this site is all about. What I see says that cuts were coming.…