Apparently, W plans to tell the world he is now serious about fiscal discipline. Expect the need to control both short-term and long-term deficits to be a big theme in tonight’s State of the Union a…

The interest rate on the 10 year Treasury note is somewhere between 4.0-4.1% -- and the US seems to be having no trouble financing its current account (or its budget) deficit right now. The risk of…

What gold was to Bretton Woods 1?In the post war Bretton Woods system, the dollar was - at least in principle - fully convertible into gold at a fixed rate.   In practice, after a certain point in th…

I'll leave it to others (Brookings, Goldman, CBPP, DeLong with some help from Concord Coalition) to transform the CBO forecast into realistic projections.  Manipulating the CBO long-term budget forec…

I agree with Mark Thoma more often than naught.   I certainly share his concern about the shifting sectoral composition of output (translated from economese to English, more jobs in housing), and, li…