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A website forum in which senior fellows of the Peterson Institute for International Economics discuss and debate their responses to global economic and financial developments as they occur each day and offer insights that others might overlook.
Yesterday morning I testified to a Joint Economic Committee of Congress hearing (update: that link may be fragile; here’s the JEC general page). The session discussed the latest GDP numbers, the impact of the fiscal stimulus earlier this year, and whether we need further fiscal expansion of any kind.
I argued that [...]
German Chancellor Angela Merkel will meet with President Obama today, June 26, in Washington to deepen US-German cooperation on economic, security, and climate-change issues. An unfortunate quote of mine to a German paper from some months back has been trotted out in the press to exemplify informed American skepticism on the German governing coalition’s economic [...]
International Monetary Fund (IMF) managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn has called for those countries with fiscal room to maneuver to enact fiscal stimulus packages of 2 percentage points of their respective national gross domestic products (GDP). This is a modest and poorly defined objective. The world needs more ambition and precision.
A more ambitious objective would be [...]
Yesterday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a Chinese television audience that they and their government are "making a very smart decision by continuing to invest in Treasury bonds." Legitimate point. It is true, President Obama’ s package to rescue the economy, including the stimulus plan and one hopes [...]
This week, Treasury Secretary-designate Tim Geithner stated clearly—and reassuringly—that the Obama administration will present a comprehensive and detailed economic recovery plan within a few weeks.
We know this plan involves a large fiscal stimulus, and it is reasonably clear there will be around $100 billion for housing refinance/mortgage mitigation (out of TARP II funding), and probably [...]
President-elect Obama’s thematic speech on his “recovery” package on January 8 served as a reminder of the mixed feelings harbored by Americans when it comes to government spending. On the one hand, the public wants action. On the other, Americans are skeptical about government’s ability to solve problems. Congress can’t politically afford to ignore either [...]
Most of the current discussion regarding the Obama Economic Plan focuses on whether the fiscal stimulus should be somewhat larger or smaller ($650 billion to $800 billion seems the current range) and the composition between spending and tax cuts. President Obama stressed on Tuesday that trillion dollar deficits are here [...]
One leading antirecession idea for the moment is a global fiscal stimulus amounting to 2 percent of the planet’s GDP. The world’s leading economies are still making their calculations, but their efforts obviously assume a big stimulus in the United States and a pretty big fiscal expansion in [...]
The usual grounds for optimism these days is the fact that the Obama administration is clearly going to propose a big fiscal package with two components: a large conventional stimulus (spending plus tax cuts), and a big housing refinance scheme, in which the Treasury will potentially become the largest-ever [...]
The current consensus view (e.g., as seen in the World Bank’s Global Economic Prospects) is that we are having a serious downturn, with annualized growth for the fourth quarter in the United States at minus 4 percent or worse. But the consensus is that a recovery will be underway by mid-2009 in the United States [...]