Trend Lines

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”   Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

This is the literary version of a concern issued many times by the noted economist Rudiger Dornbusch, who liked to say: “The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.”

Last Friday’s release of the U.S. “Monthly Treasury Report” shows a continuation of the twin trends of declining revenue and increasing expenditures.

This is the sort of fiscal stimulus that so many lawmakers argued against as the economy was being pummeled during the “great recession.”  Why is this pro-cyclical rather than counter-cyclical policy now a good idea for those same lawmakers?  Historically the U.S. fills its coffers during good times so we are better able to deal with bad times.  Rising deficits in a strong economy should be more upsetting than the latest presidential tweet. What makes the current situation so unusual and more worrying is the low short-term interest rates and the high (and rising) level of federal debt.  As interest rates rise the high levels of federal government, corporate and household debt will reveal the folly of credit-inflated growth.

This entry was posted on August 13, 2018 at 2:44 pm and is filed under Debt, Federal Deficit, Federal Spending, Fiscal Policy, Tax Revenue, Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: corporate tax, federal budget, federal deficit, federal spending, federal tax revenues