stimulus

A month ago I showed you a bunch of charts which indicated that the US economy was slowing. The upshot of the charts was that the economy was going to stall in six to nine months and that stock prices would reflect this – and they have.…

Richard Koo was on Bloomberg yesterday making a lot of good points about what public sector retrenchment will mean, namely a decrease in private sector savings. With households already highly indebted in many countries, this cannot be a…

Econ 101 Imagine you and I are the only two people in an economy. For the sake of argument, say we use sea shells as a currency and we trade with no one else but each other. So when we do trade, we exchange goods and services with each…

For all the seven long years since the signing of the Maastricht treaty started Europe on the road to that unified currency, critics have warned that the plan was an invitation to disaster. Indeed, the standard scenario for an EMU…

The Swedish government cuts its growth forecasts for this year and increased its spending to boost the economy, ahead of the Sept parliament elections.  The krona is gaining against the euro, but this is more a reflection on the euro's…

Earlier today, I had a brief e-mail exchange with Marshall Auerback in which I said that I had basically thrown in the towel on US (and global) policy makers. Early on in this crisis, I had advocated a number of policy paths which I think…

I came across an article in the FT by Gideon Rachman which examined “How Reagan ruined conservatism.” It is an interesting piece which claims that traditional conservatives abhor populism and respect knowledge, while the Reagan Revolution…

Bloomberg reports: The Japanese government’s net assets in 2009 may have fallen below zero for the first time, the Nikkei newspaper reported, citing an unidentified government official. The result, which includes the central and…

Marshall Auerback here with a post which I originally published at New Deal 2.0. What is a fiscal crisis? When does deficit spending become “unsustainable”? Today, we can see net public spending rising (sharply as a percentage of GDP in…

Last week I showed you a chart from ProPublica in my post State unemployment insurance insolvency: 50 little Hoovers which demonstrated how states are being killed by the financial strains of unemployment insurance.  Well, this week…