May 31st, 2010
The Queen is demanding her first pay rise in 20 years to plug a looming £6million deficit in the royal household’s finances. (more)
April 20th, 2010
WASHINGTON — US Vice President Joe Biden warned Tuesday the Obama administration would not let “powerful,” “cynical” foes block its financial reform plan, including the regulation of “shadowy” derivatives. (more)
April 12th, 2010
The U.S. government is racking up debt at a slower pace than last year, according to Treasury Department figures released Monday. (more)
March 30th, 2010
President Obama’s bipartisan fiscal commission, which has been charged with proposing solutions to the nation’s debt and deficit crisis, announced Tuesday that it will hold its first meeting on April 27. (more)
March 26th, 2010
President Obama’s fiscal 2011 budget will generate nearly $10 trillion in cumulative budget deficits over the next 10 years, $1.2 trillion more than the administration projected, and raise the federal debt to 90 percent of the nation’s economic output by 2020, the Congressional Budget Office reported Thursday. (more)
February 26th, 2010
The debate surrounding the massive health care system overhaul that has been raging in Washington leaves one thing clear: Redesigning roughly one-seventh of the economy is no simple task. The massive 2,000 page health care reform bills recently passed by both houses of Congress—currently languishing in Scott Brown limbo—represent an ambitious effort to reorder the “rules of the game” in health care in order to achieve dramatically different results. The goals of the plan, as described by President Obama in his state of the union address, are to “bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors, and stop insurance company abuses.” While these are admirable goals, the challenge for government is to structure a set of relationships, including incentives, to achieve these goals. A reasonable question arises: Is government the best mechanism by which to structure the incentives that control health care?
The problem is that the participants in the health care market generally aren’t concerned with achieving the noble goals of these bills. Instead, each participant—doctors, insurance companies, hospitals and individual patients—are more interested in their own narrow interests. This “What’s in it for me?” attitude is quite common among mere humans and, and makes the risks of such a massive and complex reform daunting. Utilizing the government to reorder priorities in the health care system may not be as easy as some think. Get the incentives wrong and the outcomes can be disastrous. (more)
February 25th, 2010
The Obama administration is no longer insisting on the creation of a stand-alone consumer protection agency as a central element of the plan to remake regulation of the financial system. (more)
February 18th, 2010
Britain gave another glimpse of the extent of its deteriorating public finances Thursday, when a shortfall in tax receipts led to the country’s first budget deficit in January in at least 17 years. (more)
February 18th, 2010
Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou said on Wednesday his debt-stricken country was not seeking European taxpayers’ money but needed a breathing space to cut its budget deficit and borrow “on normal conditions”. (more)
February 3rd, 2010
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama’s plan to offer tax credits to businesses that add workers is running into opposition from some rank-and-file Democrats in the House. “I don’t know anybody in business who hires an employee because they will get a tax break,” Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Calif., said Wednesday. “They hire employees because they have work to do.” (more)
January 12th, 2010
In order to stimulate its economy, Beijing re-pegged its currency to the dollar. Doing so, however, has not only increased global economic imbalances — it could ultimately harm China itself. (more)
January 8th, 2010
One of the most successful pieces of propaganda ever is the myth that the Federal Reserve exists to protect the dollar. Like all great myths it unifies its believers and shields them from the facts. But facts are stubborn things, as John Adams observed, and it is a fact that since the creation of the Federal Reserve the dollar has lost 92 percent of its purchasing power. If you had a nickel and three pennies in your hand, that’s what’s left of the dollar since the Fed took charge. Imagine if the Fed were in charge of air safety and 92 percent of the flights crashed on takeoff. That’s how well the Fed has done its purported job. (more)
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