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…

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…

I think the folks over at TPM Café are right: David Brooks' latest New York Times column is a real flip-flop.  He has gone from celebrating the United States firm commitment to universal democratic p…

Despite what David Brooks says.  The rising debt seems to be a direct consequence of cutting taxes and raising spending -- decisions the Bush Administration made.    The US may not be able to stop Ch…

The US economy looks to be slowing.   Job creation (and wage growth; also see Leonhardt in the New York Times) wasn’t that impressive even when the economy was growing strongly.   Like many, I was st…

The New York Times’ conservative columnists certainly know how to get my blood boiling.  David Brooks, among other things, apparently thinks the key to a hedge fund salary is good people skills – not…

I really liked Krishna Guha’s analysis of global imbalances that appeared in Wednesday’s FT.    His emphasis on the role of exchange rate adjustment in global rebalancing seemed right to me.  Exchang…

That would be me.  I like David Brooks’ pop sociology – for all its inaccuracies -- better than I like his politics.And when he used the term Christmas Ohioan in his Times Select column two weeks, I …

Those are – best I can tell – the words former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin used to describe the current pattern of global capital flows, one which has allowed the US to finance a current account …