News
WSJ | Geithner Urges Quick Action on Debt Crisis
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner Monday warned German leaders against leaving Europe teetering on the edge of financial disaster while trying to force troubled neighbors to overhaul their economies, saying such a strategy will be more costly financially and politically for Europe.
Blogs
Neighborhood Effects | The Ravitch Volker report: State Budget Crisis is Real
The recession of 2008 pulled the mask off of state budget pathologies that had been identified as institutional weaknesses in the decades leading to the crisis.
AEI | Time’s up on public pensions
Since 2009, I’ve been arguing that pensions for state and local government employees face multi-trillion dollar funding shortfalls, which are hidden using accounting rules that are far laxer than those applied to private sector pension plans or public sector plans in Canada or Europe.
WSJ | Why Are Entitlements Growing? Your Budget Questions Answered
David Wessel’s essay in the Saturday editions of The Wall Street Journal, an adaptation of from his new book, “Red Ink,” prompted a lot of comments and several questions from readers. Here are Wessel’s answers to a few of the questions.
Political Calculations | The Crushing Burden of Old Debt
Italy is the eighth largest economy in the world and the second-biggest manufacturing economy in Europe. The Italian government's tax collections from year to year have been near rock-steady as a percentage share of the country's GDP and, for over a decade now, the country has been running comparatively small annual budget deficits.
AEI | Does the EU have a debt crisis or a nominal GDP crisis?
It’s the NGDP, not the debt. A market monetarist perspective on the eurozone debt crisis would focus on the fact that the ECB has been negligent in providing a backdrop of reasonable NGDP growth.
Keith Hennessey | Lame Ducks and Fiscal Cliffs (part 1)
This is the first of a few posts on the policy decisions stacking up for the end of this year. In this post I will simply list the moving parts, deadlines and timeframes, and which election scenarios are most important to analyze. To some extent this is just a setup post for strategic analysis to follow over the next few days.
