A few links to check out, both over at WaPo. First, no one knows when the next recession will hit though it’s closer now than when I started writing this sentence. But I’ve got two recessionary concerns: one, fiscal policy, both discretionary and automatic will be thoroughly insufficient due to the toxic mix of Congressional… Read more
Archive for the ‘Recession/Stimulus’ Category
Fellow progressives: the macro-economy doesn’t care which party signs the stimulus check.
I’m crunching on other stuff so this will be brief, but I’ve been reading a fair bit of commentary about how Trump’s fiscal plans–infrastructure investment and tax cuts–won’t help the economy; “they’ll be recessionary, they’ll deliver higher inflation and interest rates, they’ll force the Fed to move from brake-tapping to brake-slamming.” I yield to no one… Read more
A flash from the past…
My old friend HZ sends me this pic, from the first 100 days of the Obama admin, when the job market and GDP were falling off a cliff and the new President, VP, econ and legislative teams were working around the clock to try to arrest the slide (as was the Fed, of course). We… Read more
Is there a deficit of deficit hysteria?
I hope so, and it’s what I wrote about yesterday in the WaPo. Let me entertain OTEers with a few more thoughts on the topic, including feedback I got yesterday. One response was: “You’re endorsing fiscal recklessness! There’s nothing “progressive” going on here; it’s just politicians not giving a crap about our troubled fiscal accounts.”… Read more
That second quarter GDP report: should we be worried?
I didn’t much like that GDP report from last Friday, showing that the economy expanded at an annual rate of 1.2% in the second quarter. OTEers know my methods: I prefer to smooth out the quarterly noise by looking at year-over-year trends. However, as the figure below shows, that doesn’t help so much. In fact,… Read more