government

I have highlighted some of the state of the union addresses by Herbert Hoover in the past because I see the Great depression as a time with certain parallels to the present economic hardship. Let's look at the 1970s instead now. Here's…

The chart below from the blog Pragmatic Capitalism shows the U.S. Federal government deficit for each quarter since 1952. As you can see, almost the entire period is marked by deficits.

In conclusion, while there are links between the “twin deficits”, they are not the links usually imagined. US trade and budget deficits are linked, but they do not put the US in an unsustainable position vis a vis the Chinese. If the…

the banks now browbeat governments – not by having ready cash but by threatening to go bust and drag the economy down with them if they are not given control of public tax policy, spending and planning. The process has gone furthest in the…

Last week we examined Milton Friedman’s version of Functional Finance, which we found to be remarkably similar to Abba Lerner’s. The only problem with Friedman’s analysis is that he did not account for the external sector: he wanted a…

Check out the below graphic which shows General Government Deficit/Surplus as % of GDP on the Y axis, Government Debt as % of GDP on the X axis, and the Government Debt in Euros as the size of the bubble. Pretty cool!

Milton Friedman's 1948 article, "A Monetary and Fiscal Framework for Economic Stability" put forward a proposal according to which the government would run a balanced budget only at full employment, with deficits in recession and surpluses…

Enemies of freedom will always tell you that there is some trade-off between freedom and civil liberties to get you to give up your freedom. This is a false dichotomy and always will be.

My latest post at Credit Writedowns Pro on protecting wealth in a world of recurring crisis is now up. I outlined eight principal investing risks that I see for for 2012 and strategies to avoid those risks. At the same time, the thought you…

This week we begin a new topic: functional finance. This will occupy us for the next several blog posts. Today we will lay out Abba Lerner’s approach to policy.