With a hat tip to Rebecca’s post below, normalized borrowing growth in several sectors over the past 25 years. (Source: FRB Flow of Funds data) Yes, there are three very similar (shades of blue) lines—but they are all household and non-profit data. (The growth in “credit market instruments” is, presumably, primarily driven by the non-profit […]

Update: The term corporate savings below refers to excess saving, gross saving over gross domestic investment, as a percentage of GDP. This is the defined 3-sector financial balance model (referred to below). The Federal Reserve Flow of Funds showed a third quarter shift in the financial sector balances: the corporate saving rate declined 0,25% to […]

With the release of the November data on real personal consumption expenditures it looks like real PCE growth in the fourth quarter will be over 4% (SAAR) as compared to growth rates of 0.9%, 1.9%,2.2% and 2.8% over the last four quarters, respectively. October real PCE increased 0.5% and November was up 0.3%. So if […]

I’m late to seeing this, and Bruce has probably already covered it, but Doug Elmendorg at the CBO inadvertently gives away the game on the Administration’s approach to—let alone opinion of—the Social Security “Trust Fund”: The balances in trust funds have accrued because income associated with those programs has exceeded the expenses; when that happens, […]

by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care: Regulatory Inconsistency When an elderly patient is in the hospital suffering from dementia, depression or schizophrenia, the hospital nurses may administer any psychoactive or anti-psychotic drug ordered by the physician within normal protocols and practices. When the patient becomes a nursing home resident a few days later, the […]

Had a long day of Social Security related blogginess so will just put up this to spark some discussion: In Part One of this post I discussed the danger that the 2% ‘temporary’ payroll tax cut might be a Trojan Horse destined never to expire in full or at all only to have any continuing […]

The readers of the Fiscal Times learn what everyone looking at the alphabet-soup of back-door taxpayer theft (or, as Ben Bernanke calls them, facilities) knows: There are many ways policy could have been improved; providing more help for state and local governments is high on the list, but I’ll focus on another way: using fiscal […]

by Tom Bozzo, cross-posted from Marginal Utility Competition in (increasing) service quality doesn’t reduce costs: Dane County’s two hospitals that deliver babies are each spending close to $40 million to spruce up maternity units and related facilities for a simple reason: Young women are key health care consumers, often deciding where their families will seek […]

Mark Thoma in The Fiscal Times takes a stab at explaining this recession and policy: As this year comes to a close, and as we finally begin the recovery stage of the recession, it’s a good time to look back and ask how policymakers could have improved their response to the downturn. What can we […]