Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Boomer Entitlement Mess???

Barkley Rosser at Econospeak takes aim at immigration and worker ratios: Robert Reich says so, “Why More Immigrants Are An Answer to the Coming Boomer Entitlement Mess“, which is also linked to by Mark Thoma. He has been on the Social Security Advisory board and has heard all the tales of coming Demographic Doom due […]

The 1920s Depression: Glenn Beck, Thomas Woods, and "Benefits" of Cutting Taxes to Combat a Recession, Part 1

by cactus The 1920s Depression: Glenn Beck, Thomas Woods, and “Benefits” of Cutting Taxes to Combat a Recession, Part 1 So I get an e-mail from reader Dean Moriarty, stating: Yesterday, I found myself in the sad position of inadvertantly listening to the Glenn Beck show. He was talking to some caller about how American […]

Final destination “rising public deficits” with a stopover in “falling public deficits”

Brad DeLong and Mark Thoma posit that a falling US public deficit is bad news – they are right! Deficit hysteria is now mainstream thinking, while the more appropriate hysteria should be “jobs hysteria”. How in the world is nominal income growth expected to finance a drop in consumer debt leverage if the government supports […]

Macroeconomics: en route

The Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) hosted its inaugural conference this weekend at King’s College Cambridge, an experiment of sorts. I had the pleasure of attending the conference, my first time to Cambridge. John Maynard Keynes wrote his *General Theory* at King’s College. And as if that wasn’t enough, I dined with blogging legends, […]

Reducing household financial leverage: the easy way and the hard way

In case you haven’t noticed, I have become slightly less “optimistic” about the prospects of a sustainable U.S. recovery. I used to think that the household deleveraging story was more of a decade-long project, and the economy would cycle throughout. But recent deficit hysteria has me worried; income growth might lapse. What differentiates this recovery […]

O.K., let’s just think about this budget thing for a while, Part I

To be sure, the U.S. government deficit is shocking; but it’s not anymore shocking than the recession through which we have all lived. Tax receipts plummeted (see the second chart from this post) and spending on cyclical social programs (like unemployment benefits) is surging. This adds up to an exponentially rising budget deficit, and thus […]

Get ready for a little EM inflation

Today I was thinking about tightening cycles in emerging markets; and more specifically, about that in China. Because let’s face it, China matters. China matters to the rest of Asia via competition for export income. China matters to Europe via competition for jobs. China matters to Brazil via domestic production via imports. China matters. The […]

It Takes Two to Tango: A Look at the Numerator AND Denominator

This is a guest contribution by Marshall Auerback, Braintruster at the New Deal 2.0 by Marshall Auerback A new book by Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, “This Time It’s Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Follies”, has occasioned much comment in the press and blogosphere (see here and here) The book purports to show that once […]