fiscal

Given the push toward austerity, I want to make a few remarks about the intersection of full employment with trade and exchange rates. It all begins with the British austerity budget. In regards to that budget, recently presented by the…

Blogs in the econoblogosphere are heavy on economic policy advocacy. Ever since the heyday of the US and European housing bubble, the majority of bloggers in the space who are unaffiliated with media sources have been recommending policy…

Executive Summary:  We suspect the dollar’s decline against the euro is reaching its final stages.  US interest rates appear to have largely priced in some form of quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve (though headline risk…

Below is a good comprehensive video highlighting the spending review outlined by the Chancellor George Osborne yesterday in the House of Commons. See relevant articles on this in the links. Here is an unedited version of Mr Osborne's…

The interesting thing about this clip is that Paul Krugman is probably right: you need trillions of printed dollars to get the stimulative effect the Federal Reserve is looking for. Ambrose Evans Pritchard was talking about taking the Fed's…

The short answer to my question is no. I was thinking about this early today and here's what I have come up with as a more fleshed out answer. Budget deficits are the result of an ex-post accounting identity. In plain English this means…

FDIC Chair Sheila Bair spoke with Bloomberg News yesterday and the topic was interest rates and banks ability to withstand a higher interest rate environment. While Bair was careful to stress that this is not a "short-term…

by Edward Hugh Last Thursday Moody’s Investor Service cut Spain’s Sovereign credit – to Aa1 from AAA – thus removing the last of the country’s highly-valued triple-A ratings. The move really surprised no one – in this case the Moody’s…

See video below for a discussion of this theme (hat tip Barry Ritholtz). This is a very good video for learning about how debt deflationary spirals are created by the "fallacy of composition" and how it applies to countries in a…

Professor Paul Davidson wrote the following reply to comments in my recent Bill Clinton Interview post regarding the the causes of the current recession. He believes that this issue has to become a focus of public attention and that the…