fiscal

In the US, you have a weakening recovery, uneven job growth, less accommodative monetary policy, tightening fiscal policy at the federal and local levels, austerity in Europe and tightening in emerging markets coupled with secularly high…

Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of The Good Soldiers today. As I can’t know where you stand on these wars, I can’t say whether or not reading the book will change your mind. But I can guarantee you that its on-the-ground perspective…

If the public sector balance must over time move from around -10 percent to around -3 percent to stabilize the federal debt-to-GDP ratio at tolerable levels, then the private sector balance and the current account balance must move by…

Not raising the debt ceiling will not mean default, instead it will mean other federal spending will get cut

Below is a PDF copy of the Portuguese Memorandum of Understanding for the EU - IMF bailout. Portuguese interest rates have fallen somewhat on the news of the bailout, to the lowest levels in fifth months.

Former US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill calls the people advocating brinkmanship on the debt ceiling deficit "terrorists". The United States looks more and more like a banana republic every day. If S&P wants a reason to downgrade the…

The claims about “unsustainable deficits” gained new urgency this week as S&P warned that it was downgrading US federal government debt from stable to negative (see here for recent debate). This appeared to be a blatantly political…

Michael Tanner is a Cato Institute Senior Fellow and L. Randall Wray is Professor of Economics, University of Missouri, Kansas City. The two discussed opposing views on how to deal with the U.S. federal deficit in a radio interview…

The UK is a good example of what austerity means. In the wake of tax increases and budget cuts in the UK, retail sales in Britain have plunged by the most on record. I seriously doubt that the coalition government there will meet its…

The following video talk is based on a must-read piece Professor Stiglitz wrote in Vanity Fair on inequality in the United States.