Category Archives: budget

Is the US Economy Really About to Go Boom?

Share Button

Politico asked 8 of us for a prognosis on US growth in the new year. This was my response —

Something important will get better in 2014: Fiscal policy will stop hurting the economy. The results should show up as expansion in such service sectors as health, education and construction.

The biggest impediment to economic expansion over the last three years has been destructive budget policy coming out of the Congress: misguided fiscal drag in the short term (crude cuts in spending, especially under the sequester; the expiration a year ago of Obama’s payroll tax holiday); repeated unnecessary disruptive and uncertainty-maximizing political crises (debt ceiling showdowns and government shutdown); and little progress on the genuine longer-term fiscal problem, which is the 40-year prognosis for U.S. debt (a result of projected rapid growth in entitlement spending). These fiscal failures have together probably subtracted well over a percentage point from U.S. growth in each of the last three years. read more

Share Button

Will Financial Markets Crash Before October 17, or After?

Share Button

October 4 is the first Friday of the month, the day when the Bureau of Labor Statistics routinely reports the jobs numbers for the preceding month.   Is the havoc created by our current political deadlock over fiscal policy showing up as job losses?   We have no way of knowing.  On October 1 the BLS closed for business, like many other “non-essential” parts of the government.  There will be no more employment numbers until the shutdown ends.

Last week, Wall Street economic analysts responded to the usual surveys as to what they thought the upcoming employment numbers would be.   (These surveys are what the media refers to each month when they tell you that employment rose or fell “more than economists expected.”)    The median forecast in last week’s  Bloomberg survey, for example, was a prediction that the BLS would report that “Payrolls increased by 175,000,” the biggest gain in four months.   But there was no word on how many of the respondents recognized that there would in fact probably be no number at all on October 4, because the Labor Department would have been closed by the government shutdown. read more

Share Button

Japan’s Consumption Tax: Take it Slow and Steady

Share Button

Japan’s consumption tax rate is scheduled to increase substantially in April (from 5% to 8%).  The motive is to address the long-term problem of very high debt.  (Takatoshi Ito has stated the case in favor of the tax increase.)  Prime Minister Shinzō Abe has apparently decided to go ahead with it.   Many observers, however, are worried that the loss in purchasing power resulting from the sharp increase in the sales tax rate will send the Japanese economy back into recession.

It is very reminiscent of April 1997.   I remember Larry Summers, who was then Undersecretary of the US Treasury, repeatedly warning the Japanese government that if it went ahead with the consumption tax hike that was scheduled for that date, Japan’s economy would go back into recession.  I was in the US government then too.  As the date drew near, I asked Summers why he persisted in offering Tokyo this unwanted advice, given that the prime minister of the day was clearly locked into the policy politically.    Summers told me that he knew he was unlikely to change their minds, but that he wanted to be sure the Japanese would realize their mistake when they went ahead with the tax increase and his prediction subsequently came true – as it did. read more

Share Button