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Newswire
Washington debate on deficits features Broadway and off-Broadway eventsIt is fiscal sustainability week in Washington as a round of official and less-than-official meetings on the US deficit got under way Tuesday, with the first session of the president’s new commission on fiscal policy.“In theory, there are few issues on which there is more vigorous bipartisan agreement than fiscal responsibility,” President Barack Obama said in launching the commission. “But in practice, this responsibility for the future is often overwhelmed by the politics of the moment.” Co-chairs of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility are Erskine Bowles, a former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton who gets some of the credit for getting the budget balanced in that administration, and Alan Simpson, a former republican senator from Wyoming. The panel faces a 1 December deadline for presenting its deficit reduction plan to the president. The 18-member panel, composed of a clutch of legislators and a handful of private sector representatives, risked being upstaged by a fiscal summit being held on Wednesday by the Peterson Institute of International Economics. Headlined by former President Clinton, the summit is to include Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin and Peter Peterson himself. The Peterson Institute, a bastion of deficit hawks, has come under fire for the meeting, especially since many critics consider Greenspan and Rubin discredited by the policies they espoused that may have led to the financial crisis. Partly to counter the Peterson summit, a group of progressive economists under the post-Keynesian banner organised a Fiscal Sustainability Teach-In for the same day at George Washington University. This meeting will feature Bill Mitchell from the University of Newcastle in Australia and speakers from the University of Missouri in Kansas City and the Levy Institute at Bard College in New York. Their starting point, oddly enough, was summed up by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke in his appearance before the fiscal commission on Tuesday. “Neither experience nor economic theory clearly indicates the threshold at which government debt begins to endanger prosperity and economic stability,” Bernanke said. Bernanke is no post-Keynesian, and his remark was followed by the call to take urgent action anyway, but it is the premise of modern monetary theorists calling for a different view on government deficits. They call the mainstream economists at the Peterson Institute ‘deficit terrorists’.
Issue Articles
Merkel’s legacy: The demise of the euro?By dragging its feet in signing up to the Greek bailout, Germany plunged European markets into further disarray this week and prompted questions in some quarters as to whether Chancellor Angela Merkel is about to destroy the euro.
Pecora rides again as Senate panel skewers Goldman witnessesHighly paid Goldman Sachs directors were skewered in a US Senate hearing on Tuesday by a voluminous compilation of e-mails that appeared to reveal a pattern of self-dealing and cynical exploitation of clients in trading sub-prime mortgage securities.
Central banker’s harsh verdict on Greece might have a wider applicationGreece’s central bank governor, George Provopoulos, had some harsh words for his compatriots on Tuesday as he exhorted them to break with the past and do what is necessary to right the country’s fiscal and economic situation.
Washington debate on deficits features Broadway and off-Broadway eventsIt is fiscal sustainability week in Washington as a round of official and less-than-official meetings on the US deficit got under way Tuesday, with the first session of the president’s new commission on fiscal policy.
New Nigerian finance minister mounts effort to establish SWFNigeria finally seems to be getting serious about a sovereign wealth fund (SWF), with the new finance minister, former Goldman Sachs manager Olesegun Aganga, spearheading a new effort to establish a vehicle for investing the nation’s oil wealth. |
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