Fiscal Fallacies – The Root of All Sovereign Debt Crises: Amar Bhidé & Edmund Phelps economywatch.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from economywatch.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
10 August 2011.
During the 1970s, Former Citibank Chief Executive Walter Wriston famously declared that countries would never go bust or bankrupt. Governments also started to borrow large sums of money in order to fuel their spending, while lenders continued to provide these governments with a seemingly endless source of funds. Eventually, government debts grew to such insurmountable proportions that countries today are now faced with the distinct possibility of a default or even bankruptcy. How can we address the structural issues that threaten to consume the global economy?
NEW YORK – The Greek debt crisis has prompted questions about whether the euro can survive without a nearly unimaginable centralization of fiscal policy. There is a simpler way.
Three important recent initiatives from US President Joe Biden’s administration illustrate America’s reengagement with the world and support for inclusive global multilateralism. The big question now, with the United States again seeking to play an international leadership role, is whether such cooperation can work – and how China will react to the US proposals, given rising bilateral tensions.
The first major initiative was US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s call for a new $650 billion issuance of special drawing rights (SDRs, the International Monetary Fund’s reserve asset) – something that President Donald Trump’s administration had blocked.
Details of the plan, which has been endorsed by the G20 finance ministers and central bank governors and the International Monetary and Financial Committee, are still to be worked out. It would not only involve a record new $650 billion SDR issuance to countries in proportion to their IMF quotas. It also calls on countries no
April 20, 2021
Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from New Left Review Ten years ago, Erdoğan’s Turkey was hailed in Washington as an example to the Muslim world a free-market, pro-American Islamic democracy with high growth rates, renowned cultural monuments and beautiful beaches. ‘A model partner’, Obama affirmed in 2009, as he congratulated the leader of the Justice and Development Party (AKP).
1 Today, with perhaps 50,000 oppositionists in jail, including scores of journalists, politicians, lawyers and civil servants, Turkey is exporting radical Islamist mercenaries from its Syrian enclaves to Libya and Azerbaijan, clashing with France, Greece, Israel and Cyprus over gas-drilling rights in the Eastern Mediterranean and imposing a brutal occupation regime on swathes of what was once the autonomous Kurdish zone of Rojava. Predictably, the cry of ‘Who lost Turkey?’ has gone up within the American foreign-policy establishment, where th
The de-carbonisation paradox
By Kemal Derviş and Sebastián Strauss
WASHINGTON, DC Discussions about climate change contain two apparently contradictory messages. One is that it is almost impossible to de-carbonise fully and fast enough to limit global warming this century to well below 2ºC relative to pre-industrial levels. The other message is that, given what is at stake, such rapid de-carbonisation is inevitable.
Paradoxically, both statements may be true. Achieving a net-zero global economy by 2050 is technically and economically feasible with existing and emerging technologies, but it requires drastic shifts in behaviour and massive policy interventions, including a degree of international cooperation that will be very difficult to attain. Although faster technological progress can ease some of the social and political barriers to climate action, such innovation alone will not get the world all the way to net zero.