2018-06-01 07:30:00 Fri ET
treasury deficit debt employment inflation interest rate macrofinance fiscal stimulus economic growth fiscal budget public finance treasury bond treasury yield sovereign debt sovereign wealth fund tax cuts government expenditures
The U.S. federal government debt has risen from less than 40% of total GDP about a decade ago to 78% as of May 2018. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that this ratio will surge to 96% in 2028. Although many blame the Trump tax cuts as the key root cause, the increases in health care and retirement benefits suggest a different real reason for U.S. deficit severity.
Harvard professor Martin Feldstein attributes the recent rise of U.S. budget deficit from 4% to 5% of total GDP to increases in Medicare and social security retirement benefits for middle-class older Americans. These increases in core health care and retirement benefits account for about 2.7% of total GDP. The neoclassical Sargent-Wallace thesis suggests that the central bank cannot finance incessant increases in core deficits with government bond issuance regardless of money supply growth. This money supply expansion would lead to inexorable inflationary pressures that defeat the dual mandate of both maximum employment and price stability in the suboptimal fiscal-monetary policy coordination. Inflation serves as a seigniorage tax that would in turn dampen real macroeconomic variates such as household consumption, capital investment, labor supply, and total economic output. In light of this ripple effect on sustainable financial market growth and prosperity, the law of inadvertent consequences counsels caution.
If any of our AYA Analytica financial health memos (FHM), blog posts, ebooks, newsletters, and notifications etc, or any other form of online content curation, involves potential copyright concerns, please feel free to contact us at service@ayafintech.network so that we can remove relevant content in response to any such request within a reasonable time frame.
2018-12-05 09:38:00 Wednesday ET
Federal Reserve publishes its inaugural flagship financial stability report. Fed Chair Jerome Powell applauds both low inflation (2%) and low unemployment (
2018-09-15 11:35:00 Saturday ET
Apple releases its September 2018 trifecta of smart phones or iPhone X sequels: iPhone Xs, iPhone Xs Max, and iPhone XR. Both iPhone Xs and iPhone Xs Max ha
2019-05-21 12:37:00 Tuesday ET
Chicago finance professor Raghuram Rajan shows that free markets need populist support against an unholy alliance of private-sector and state elites. When a
2019-05-11 10:28:00 Saturday ET
The Trump administration still expects to reach a Sino-U.S. trade agreement with a better mechanism for intellectual property protection and enforcement. Pr
2018-01-13 08:39:00 Saturday ET
The Economist digs deep into the political economy of U.S. government shutdown over 3 days in January 2018. In more than 4 years since 2014, U.S. government
2019-11-19 09:33:00 Tuesday ET
American unemployment declines to the 50-year historical low level of 3.5% with moderate job growth. Despite a sharp slowdown in U.S. services and utilities