Global Investors Are Telling Donald Trump His Deficits and National…
Washington is unnerved these days about budget deficits and the national debt. Deficit angst comes along periodically, often as a pretext for cutting social spending. This time, however, there’s genuine cause for alarm. Outsized deficits are par for the course when the economy is in recession or reeling from a shock like the pandemic or the financial collapse; most of… Continue reading
The Political Challenges We Face To Preserve the Earth
It’s Earth Day as I write this, and the challenges to preserve the Earth as we know it are momentous ones. The biggest and most obvious one is climate change, since it involves the most serious threat. Getting Congress to pass a plan that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to be meaningful will be a very tall order. The…Continue reading
How the Housing Crisis Can Change National Attitudes
The Great Depression deeply affected the attitudes of the generation that came of age in the 1920s and 1930s. For example, it made the country thriftier and more Democratic. It took two full generations for other social changes to turn us into a society that was more Republican and saved much less — shifts led, as before, by those who…Continue reading
Time to Face the Facts: The Economy Probably Won’t Get…
Brace yourself for a very anxious and stormy time, economically and politically, because there’s little prospect that the U.S. economy will improve for quite some time. The latest to weigh in is the Federal Reserve, whose new private forecast sees no growth in sight for the rest of this year and slow gains at best for 2010. The Fed always…Continue reading
Is Cap-and-Trade a Dead Policy Walking?
In his February 24 speech to Congress, President Obama asked members “to send me legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution.†So, yesterday, House Energy and Commerce chair Henry Waxman took the first step by introducing his cap-and-trade plan. Yet sometimes, the political sands shift underneath a policy approach that was once viable, even embraced broadly, and its…Continue reading
Treasury’s New Program Mixes Sound Economics and Wishful Thinking
The administration’s new program to wring the toxic assets out of the banking system is a huge bet, which, like most of the previous reforms for the current crisis, is based equally on sound economics and a good dose of wishful thinking. The truth is, it couldn’t be otherwise: We’ve never experienced this kind of crisis before, so we cannot…Continue reading
Anticipating Inflation Now Can Save Taxpayers $50-$70 Billion
The Federal Reserve yesterday announced $725 billion in new purchases of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac securities to hold up housing finance, along with plans to buy $300 billion in Treasury securities. Before this latest program, the Fed was already running the most expansionary modern monetary policy since the Weimar Republic. On top of $2 trillion in guarantees for a…Continue reading
Why This is No Traditional Recession
The leaders of the Republican Party (and plenty of their followers) continue on their strange path of denying the most basic economic logic in the midst of economic crisis and opposing whatever the President says or does. Happily, the Obama administration knows economics, and they seem to generally know themselves. Yet, they may still overestimate the extent of their powers,…Continue reading
The Denial and Anger Inside GOP Economic Policy
The leaders of the Republican Party, reeling from their painful string of defeats, seem stuck in two of the classic stages of grief, denial and anger. This week, Rush Limbaugh replaced Bobby Jindal as the leading and most colorful example. Limbaugh may seem like too easy a target, since talk radio always tends towards hyperbole. Nonetheless, the essence of the…Continue reading