Politics

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…

By William K. Black cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives In the Savings and Loan (S&L) debacle Speaker Wright became enraged at the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and the Department of Justice when he learned that the FBI was…

It is one of the paradoxes of life that the most practical means to ensure that the system does not collapse is to insist on justice for all and to ignore demands for special treatment premised on claims that justice places the system at…

When unemployment is high, immigrants are seen as a burden and the mood shifts toward the anti-immigration rhetoric we are hearing from Mr. Cameron. Economic nationalism is a force to be reckoned with. This anti-foreigner sentiment will…

No, I am not talking about tonight's speech from President Obama. This is about another President's speech, very loosely based on the Oscar Winner, "The King's Speech". Can you guess who the President is? Have a look at the video.…

I read a very good piece on the psychology of economic nationalism by SocGen 's Dylan Grice earlier today. Because of some relevant thoughts from a reader regarding austerity, I wanted to pass on my thoughts on what he wrote in the context…

A sovereign nation that issues debt in its own fiat currency cannot default involuntarily. Again, this is the Ecuador risk factor, defaulting for purely political reasons, not because of the inability to pay. It is not clear whether there…

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

The U.S. narrowly avoided a federal government shutdown this past weekend. While President Obama has hailed the compromise which allowed the government to continue to function, it is already clear that more shutdown battles are coming very…