From this morning’s Wall Street Journal: President Barack Obama’s 2012 budget proposal projects this year’s deficit will reach $1.6 trillion, the largest on record, as December’s tax-cut deal begins to reduce federal revenues, a senior Democrat said Sunday. The new forecast is larger than the $1.48 trillion deficit projected last month by the Congressional Budget [...]
Neil Irwin and Washington Post graphic designers Wilson Andrews and Alicia Parlapiano provided an excellent rundown of the crisis in European sovereign debt. The image at left is a representation of their interactive graphic showing vulnerability in banking and trade as a percentage of gross domestic product. The line thickness represents how much is at [...]
The estimable Robert Samuelson wrote in The Washington Post last month: What we’re seeing in Greece is the death spiral of the welfare state. This isn’t Greece’s problem alone, and that’s why its crisis has rattled global stock markets and threatens economic recovery. Virtually every advanced nation, including the United States, faces the same prospect. [...]
Steven Pearlstein wrote in The Washington Post on Friday: The global economic system is rebalancing itself after years in which the United States was not only allowed but encouraged to live beyond its means, consuming more than it produced and investing more than it saved. Now the bill for that is finally coming due — [...]
After just eight months in office, Japan’s prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, resigned last week. The public reason given was the continued presence of the US military base on Okinawa, but the real reason was the deteriorating financial picture. Nobody knows what to do as Japan threatens to blow up on a scale that would make [...]
