RNC Chair and Wisconsinite Reince Priebus tells reporters nothing much to see of interest in the Wisconsin senate recall elections scheduled next week.
Back in the ’80s and ’90s the big argument I remember hearing on the fiscal policy front was that using fiscal policy (ie., spending) to dig the country out of a recession was inefficient since by the time you could get productive spending online (as opposed to the shock-absorber effect of unemployment insurance, etc.) the business-cycle would be pulling the country out of recession. So the spending would be unneeded, possibly inflationary and just add to the debt. With a normal cyclical downturn there may be some logic to that. After all, Keynes never figured you do away with the business cycle entirely. Read More
Lawrence Summers says we’re facing a 1 in 3 chance of a double dip recession.
With congressional Republicans inflexible on starving the economy of any fiscal strategies to create jobs, this looks very bad, both economically and politically.
I think this is the image I’ll remember from the debt ceiling trainwreck of 2011.
Over at TPM Medialabs, we’re discussing how true identities versus anonymity affects the quality of user comments.
From the FT …
“Unless we are missing something the US is one false move away from a recession,” says Jim Reid, strategist at Deutsche Bank, who has warned the US could be approaching a “1937 moment” – when authorities removed post-Depression stimuli from still-fragile markets and triggered another recession. This risk, he says, has in fact only been magnified in the markets’ eyes by agreement on raising the US debt ceiling.
House Republicans try to force Reid’s hand on FAA shutdown but he won’t give in, tens of thousands thrown out of work.