IREF’s Director for Europe Pierre Garello has been invited to speek about public debt on Bloomberg TV. You can see the interview here.
2011
is the number of new regulatory actions in the works in the United States. Even before those 4,257 new regulations go into effect, the Federal Register shows more than 81,000…
It seems that the forecast of a 3.5% decrease in Greece GDP in 2011 was too optimistic. The finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos said last week that the output is likely…
The upper chamber of the German parliament is due to vote on the new expanded powers of the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) on 23 September. At that point, early…
The game of representative democracy is such that we constantly have to choose, not between policies, but between programs that are best seen as baskets of policies to be implemented if the candidate supporting that program is elected. The basket that the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, “sold” to his electors in 2007 was, as always, made of all kinds of policies. But there was one on which he particularly insisted on during the elections and that, in my opinion, brought him the support from many voters: the promise that, if he was elected, individuals who will work more will earn more. “Travailler plus pour gagner plus”– with those words, he was promoting a move away from a society in which the extra money you make is redistributed away from you. At least that’s the way many people understood it.
In 2009, 31.3% of the French GDP has been spent on welfare payments. Those include spending by the State-managed health care system, unemployment benefits and social benefits. The government agency in charge of those payments has tripled its deficits during the past 3 years reaching a record 28 billion € in 2010. The annual amount of welfare payments reached 597,5 billion € in 2009, which is largely superior to the whole amount of the Greek debt (€328 billion).
This article first appeared in the Wall Street Journal
Markets always make good scapegoats. When they do well, they are populated by profiteers. When they do badly, they are accused of causing trouble for everyone else.The denizens of the Dow, Nasdaq, CAC and DAX floors may be speculators and myopics. Yet it’s hard to find even the most reckless private participant who behaves as though his credit is limitless.
The world is probably going to change after the recent downgrading by Standard&Poor’s of the US debt rating from triple A to AA+. Beyond the disturbing loss of the landmark Treasuries represented for global finance, what is important here is the awareness that even the biggest world economy is not allowed anymore to do just anything with public spending. The message is clear. The current crisis is actually giving the opportunity to put the political genie back in the bottle. It is now time to grasp this chance, but will political decision makers have the will to do it?
Standard&Poor’s, one of the three major credit rating agencies downgraded on Friday the USA credit rating, previously noted AAA, the highest possible level. The new rating AA+ is translating the worry of experts about the sustainability of US public finances, in the context of ever increasing public spending and public debt above $14.3 trillion. The debt deal signed by the Congress is projecting savings of $1.2 trillion, which S&P estimates to be insufficient.
This is the number of times the American Congress raised the debt ceiling in the last ten years. This is revealing systemic problems and, at some point, the incapacity of…