Posts Tagged ‘stimulus’
This guest post is contributed by Mark Paul and Anastasia Wilson. Both are members of the class of 2011 at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. In some cultures asking how the kids are doing is a colloquial way of asking how the individual is faring, acknowledging that the vitality of the younger generation is a good [...]
By James Kwak This could be a midsize political battle in the run0up to the midterm elections, as discussed by The New York Times. The positions on both sides are too obvious to warrant repeating. If I recall correctly, the Obama administration hurt itself by underestimating the course of future unemployment a year ago when [...]
The fiscal stimulus debate is currently hampered by confusion over its objectives. On the one hand, one purpose of the stimulus is to generate economic activity quickly in order to boost aggregate demand and break the recessionary spiral we seem to be in. On the other hand, people rightly worry about the capacity of the [...]
Barack Obama did not actually predict trillion-dollar deficits indefinitely; more precisely, he said, “unless we take decisive action, even after our economy pulls out of its slide, trillion-dollar deficits will be a reality for years to come” (emphasis added). At the same time, the highly competent Congressional Budget Office projected a $1.2 trillion deficit for [...]
On Monday, the IMF released a new research “note” entitled “Fiscal Policy for the Crisis,” which sets out recommendations for fiscal policy to address the global economic downturn. The premises of the note are, first, that the financial system must be fixed before it is possible to increase demand and, second, that there is limited [...]
240,000 jobs lost in October; September revised from 159,000 to 284,000; August from 73,000 to 127,000. That’s 419,000 jobs less than we thought we had a month ago. It’s 651,000 less than there were three months ago. And because we need 140,000 new jobs each month just to keep place with population growth, that’s over [...]
(For the complete set of Beginners articles, see the Financial Crisis for Beginners page.) So, it looks like we’re in a recession. What’s a recession?
We have several times emphasized the need for a large economic stimulus package to limit the extent and damage of the recession that we are almost certainly in already – a need recognized by economists from Nouriel Roubini to Larry Summers to Martin Feldstein. More recently, I speculated on the relationship between democratic politics and [...]
Conservative economist and deficit hawk Martin Feldstein is arguing that we need an economic stimulus package now (immediately after the election) that is big ($100 billion won’t cut it) and long. OK, he didn’t explicitly say it should be long, but he did say this: Previous attempts to use government spending to stimulate an economic [...]
Here is the written testimony I submitted to the JEC. In my verbal presentation this morning (5 minutes only, strictly enforced) I stressed the following. 1. The global economy is slowing fast, and likely faces an unprecedented (since 1945) recesssion. The pressures on emerging markets are intense, and inflexibility in Europe in both policy (Eurozone, I’m [...]
Economic stimulus is in the air. (Simon, in fact, is testifying on the subject before the Joint Economic Committee later this week.) Menzie Chinn at Econbrowser has a data-heavy post today on multipliers – the impact on GDP of in different types of stimulus (tax rebates, tax cuts, unemployment benefits, etc.). He concludes that the [...]
With recession news getting worse every day (here’s one depressing roundup), there is a high likelihood that the Congress will pass an economic stimulus plan either in a lame-duck session in November or immediately after reconvening in January. General sentiment seems to be against tax rebate checks (Martin Feldstein summarizes the argument that the vast [...]
One of the challenges of the current financial crisis/credit crunch/recession/whatever you call the mess that we’re in is that there are so many things going on at once – stabilizing the financial system, housing, economic stimulus, regulation, emerging markets crisis, now incipient currency crisis, … Luckily, there are many other smart commentators out there working [...]
Even the most casual observer will have realized that the U.S. government is laying out a lot of money to combat the financial crisis. Which raises the obvious question: can we afford it? The first important thing to keep in mind is that the U.S. government, unlike every other government in the world, has the [...]
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Gene Sperling, Then and Now
July 8, 2011 in Commentary, Debt
Tags: budget deficit, stimulus
By James Kwak Mike Konczal points out Gene Sperling’s recent performance on MSNBC, arguing that uncertainty about long-term deficits is weighing on the economy. What surprised me is that I was just (re-)reading about the early days of the Clinton economic team, and back then Sperling was on the other side of the debate. In Robert [...]