The House passed yesterday a stop-gap spending bill to keep the government operating through Mar 18. It would keep most agencies operating at their current funding levels but also enact about $4B in cuts as a down payment of sorts for the GOP package of $60B in spending cuts, which was approved by the House […]
Category Archives: Sovereign Debt
Tick Tock Toward Midnight
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 […]
Also posted in US Economy, US politics
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European Financial Contagion
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 […]
Posted in Sovereign Debt
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Dawdling Into The Abyss
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. […]
Also posted in Society
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The Bill Cometh
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 — […]
