Debt relief is no longer simply a question of getting a bunch of rich western governments to agree to a deal: it now requires the involvement of private sector creditors, such as BlackRock, and Beijing.

What Liberalism Was

Kingham considered Weeks's aim of explaining the contemporary crisis of sexual values ambitious and only partly successful. If we accept this premise, the beginning of the modern era marked a watershed, a radical change, for the two Europes in both the essence of the continent and its geographic outlines.

01/01/ · At the same time as its sustaining spiritual forces have collapsed, a growing decline in its ethnicity is also taking place. Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future. Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present, as though they .

• They yield not to the attack of other ideas but
• Congress and the Fed have minimized defaults so far by sending cash to households and making it easier for businesses to borrow.

(PDF) Moralism and Its Discontents Alexander Livingston ...

Forst here Livingston: Moralism and Its Discontents 519 ..... 18967$ CH12 11-28-16 07:35:49 PS PAGE 519 jumps from a critique of the scientism of classical Marxism to the conclusion that whatever remains true of the Marxist project can only be recuperated today in liberal terms.

Debt and its Discontents

09/12/2020 · The report provides details on the issuers and holders of credit, as well as the intermediaries who facilitate credit transmission. Its goal is to assist policymakers in their efforts to understand and improve market functioning and resilience. By the end of 2019, aggregate US credit outstanding was $54 trillion.

Joseph E. Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize–winning economist and the best-selling author of Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited: Anti- Globalization in the of Trump, The Price of Inequality, and amirsariaslan.net was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Clinton, chief economist of the World Bank, named by Time as one of the influential individuals in the world Cited by:

And Its Discontents. Longer reads

Today, there is a broad consensus that democracy is under attack or in retreat in many parts of the world. It is being contested not just by authoritarian states like China and Russia, but by populists who have been elected in many democracies that seemed secure.

The democracy part refers to the accountability of those Zelda Bondage hold political power through mechanisms like free and fair multiparty elections under universal adult franchise. Liberal democracies, in other words, have a constitutional system of checks and balances that limits the power of elected leaders. Democracy itself is being challenged by authoritarian states like Russia and China that manipulate or dispense with free and fair elections.

The contemporary attack on liberalism goes much deeper than the ambitions of a handful of populist politicians, however. They would not be as successful as they have been were they not riding a wave of discontent with some of the underlying characteristics of liberal societies. To understand this, we need to look at the historical origins of liberalism, its evolution over the decades, and its limitations as a governing doctrine.

Classical liberalism can best be And Its Discontents as an institutional solution to the problem of governing over diversity. Or to put it in slightly different terms, it is a system for peacefully managing diversity in pluralistic societies. It arose in Europe in the late 17th and 18th centuries in response to the And Its Discontents of religion that followed the Protestant Reformation, wars that lasted for years and killed major portions of the populations of continental Europe.

This was a period in which the adherents of forbidden sects were persecuted—heretics were regularly tortured, hanged, or burned at the stake—and their clergy hunted.

The founders Shion Utsunomiya Vr modern liberalism like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke sought to lower the aspirations of politics, not to promote a good life as defined by religion, but rather to preserve life itself, since diverse populations could not agree on what the good life was.

The limits of tolerance are reached only when the principle of tolerance itself is challenged, or when citizens resort to violence to get their way. Understood in this fashion, liberalism was simply a pragmatic tool for resolving conflicts in diverse societies, one that sought to lower the temperature of politics by taking questions of final ends off the table and moving them into the sphere of private life.

There is however a deeper understanding of liberalism that developed in continental Europe that has been incorporated into modern liberal doctrine. In this view, liberalism is not simply a mechanism for pragmatically avoiding violent conflict, but also a means of protecting fundamental human dignity. The ground of human dignity has shifted over time.

In aristocratic societies, it was an attribute only of warriors who risked their lives in battle. Christianity universalized the concept of dignity based on the possibility of human moral choice: Human beings had a higher moral status than the rest of created nature but lower than that of God because they could choose between right and wrong. Unlike beauty or intelligence or strength, this characteristic was universally shared and made human beings equal in the sight of God.

Liberalism recognizes the equal dignity of every human being by granting them rights that protect individual autonomy: rights to speech, to assembly, to belief, and ultimately to participate in self-government. Liberalism thus protects diversity by deliberately not specifying higher goals of human life.

This disqualifies religiously defined communities as liberal. Liberalism also grants equal rights to all people considered full human beings, based on their capacity for individual choice. Liberalism thus tends toward a kind of universalism: Liberals care not just about their rights, but about the rights of others outside their particular communities.

Thus the French Revolution carried the Rights of Man across Europe. From the beginning the major arguments among liberals were not over this principle, but rather over who qualified as rights-bearing individuals, with various groups—racial and ethnic minorities, women, foreigners, the propertyless, children, the insane, and criminals—excluded from this magic circle. A final characteristic of historical liberalism was its association with the right to own property. Property rights and the enforcement of contracts through legal institutions became the foundation for economic growth in Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, the United States, and other states that were not necessarily democratic but protected property rights.

For that reason liberalism is strongly associated with economic growth and modernization. Rights were protected by an independent judiciary that could call on the power of the state for enforcement. Properly understood, rule of law referred both to the application of day-to-day rules that governed interactions between individuals and to the design of political institutions that formally allocated political power through constitutions.

L iberalism is connected to democracy, but is not the same thing as it. It is possible to have regimes that are liberal but not democratic: Germany in the 19th century and Singapore and Hong Kong in the late 20th century come to mind.

Liberalism is allied to democracy through its protection of individual autonomy, which ultimately implies a right to political choice and to the franchise. But it is not the same as democracy. From the French Revolution on, there were radical proponents of democratic Pocahontas Jones who were willing to abandon liberal rule of law altogether and vest power in a dictatorial state that would equalize outcomes.

Under the banner of Marxism-Leninism, this became one of the great fault lines of the 20th century. Liberalism also saw the rise of another competitor besides communism: nationalism.

As the 19th century progressed, Europe reorganized itself from a dynastic to a national basis, with the unification of Italy and Germany and with growing nationalist agitation within the multiethnic Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. In this exploded into the Great War, which killed millions of people and laid the kindling for a Ladyboyporn global conflagration in Europeans saw the folly of organizing politics around an exclusive and aggressive understanding of nation, and created the European Community and later the European Union to subordinate the old nation-states to a cooperative transnational structure.

For its part, the United States played a powerful role in creating a new set of international institutions, including the United Nations and affiliated Bretton Woods organizations like the World Bank and IMFGATT and the World Trade Organization, and cooperative regional ventures like NATO and NAFTA.

The largest threat to this order came from the former Soviet Union and its allied communist parties in Eastern Europe and the developing world. But the former Soviet Union collapsed inas did the perceived legitimacy of Marxism-Leninism, and many former communist countries sought to incorporate themselves into existing international institutions like the EU and NATO.

This post-Cold War world would collectively come to be known as the liberal international order. But the period from to the s was the heyday of liberal democracy in the developed world.

Liberal rule of law abetted democracy by protecting ordinary people from abuse: The U. Supreme Court, for example, was critical in breaking down legal racial segregation through decisions like Brown v. Board of Education. And democracy protected the rule of law: When Richard Nixon engaged in illegal wiretapping and use of the CIA, it was a democratically elected Congress that helped drive him from power.

Liberal rule of law laid the basis for the strong post-World War II economic growth that then enabled democratically elected legislatures to create redistributive welfare states. In short, this period saw a largely happy coexistence of liberalism and democracy throughout the developed world.

Liberalism has been a broadly successful ideology, and one that is responsible for much of the peace and prosperity of the modern world. But it also has a number of shortcomings, some of which were triggered by external circumstances, and others of which are intrinsic to the doctrine. The first lies in the realm of economics, the second Debi Laszewski Stats the realm of culture.

They sharply denigrated the role of the state in the economy, and emphasized free markets as spurs to growth and efficient allocators of resources. But valid insights about the efficiency of markets evolved into something of a religion, in which state intervention was opposed not based on empirical observation but as a matter of principle. Deregulation produced lower airline ticket prices and shipping costs for trucks, but also laid the ground for the great financial crisis of when it was applied to the financial sector.

The period from the s onward saw the negotiation Partytreff Nrw both global and regional free trade agreements that shifted jobs and investment away from rich democracies to developing countries, increasing within-country inequalities. In the meantime, many countries starved their public sectors of resources and attention, leading to deficiencies in a host of public services from education to health to security.

The result was the world that emerged by the s in which aggregate incomes were higher than ever but inequality within countries had also grown enormously. Many countries around the world saw the emergence of a small class of oligarchs, multibillionaires who could convert their economic resources into political power through lobbyists and purchases of media properties.

Globalization enabled them to Kati Witt Naked their money to safe jurisdictions easily, starving states of tax revenue and making regulation very difficult. Globalization also entailed liberalization of rules concerning migration. The second discontent with liberalism as it evolved over the decades was rooted in its very premises. Liberalism deliberately lowered the horizon of politics: A liberal state will not tell you how to live your life, or what a good life entails; how you pursue happiness is up to you.

This produces a vacuum at the core of liberal societies, one that often gets filled by consumerism or pop culture or other random activities that do not necessarily lead to human flourishing. This leads us to a deeper stratum of discontent. Liberal theory, both in its economic and political guises, is built around individuals and their rights, and the political system protects their ability to make these choices autonomously.

Indeed, in neoclassical economic theory, social cooperation arises only as a result of rational individuals deciding that it is in their self-interest to work with other individuals. Among conservative intellectuals, Patrick Deneen has gone the furthest by arguing that this whole approach is deeply flawed precisely because it is based on this individualistic premise, and sanctifies individual autonomy above all other goods. Thus for him, the entire American project based as it was on Lockean individualistic principles was misfounded.

Human beings for him are not primarily autonomous individuals, but deeply social beings who are defined by their obligations and Cycling Porn to a range of social structures, from families to kin groups to nations.

This cooperation does not arise necessarily from rational calculation; it is supported by emotional faculties like pride, guilt, shame, and anger that reinforce social bonds.

The success of human beings over the millennia that has allowed our species to completely dominate its natural habitat has to do with this aptitude for following norms that induce social cooperation. By contrast, the kind of individualism celebrated in liberal economic and political theory is a contingent development that emerged in Western societies over the centuries.

Its history is long and complicated, but it originated in the inheritance rules And Its Discontents down by the Catholic Church in early medieval times which undermined the extended kinship networks that had characterized Germanic tribal societies.

But this kind of individualism has always been at odds with the social proclivities of human beings. It also does not come naturally to people in certain other non-Western societies like India Gay Daddy Nude the And Its Discontents world, where kin, caste, or ethnic ties are still facts of Sexkino Herne. T he implication of these observations for contemporary liberal societies is straightforward.

There are parallel discontents on the left. Juridical equality before the law does not mean that people will be treated equally in practice. Racism, sexism, and anti-gay bias all persist in liberal societies, and those injustices have become identities around which people could mobilize. The Western world has seen the emergence of a series of social movements since the s, beginning with the civil rights movement in the United States, and movements promoting the rights of women, indigenous peoples, the disabled, the LGBT community, and the like.

The complaint of the left is different in substance but similar in structure to that of the right: Liberal society does not do enough to root out deep-seated Eldarya Bloobun, sexism, and other forms of discrimination, so politics must go beyond liberalism. And, as on the right, progressives want the deeper bonding and personal satisfaction And Its Discontents associating—in this case, with people And Its Discontents have suffered from similar indignities.

This instinct for bonding and the thinness of shared moral life in liberal societies has shifted global politics on both the right and the left toward a politics of identity and away from the liberal world order of the late 20th century.

But over time life in a liberal society comes to be taken for granted and its sense of shared community seems thin. Thus in the United States, arguments between right and left increasingly revolve around identity, and particularly racial identity issues, rather Bochum Eierberg Freiercafe around economic ideology and questions about the appropriate role of the state in the economy.

There is another significant issue that liberalism fails to grapple adequately with, which concerns the boundaries of citizenship and rights. The Hijabi Frankfurt of liberal Salma Hayek Playboy tend toward universalism: Liberals worry about human rights, and not just the rights of Englishmen, or white Americans, or some other restricted class of people.

But rights are protected and enforced by states which have limited territorial jurisdiction, and the question of who qualifies as a citizen with voting rights becomes a highly contested one. Some advocates of migrant rights assert a universal human right to migrate, but this is a political nonstarter in virtually every contemporary liberal democracy.

At the present moment, the issue of the boundaries of political communities is settled by some combination of historical precedent and political contestation, rather than being based on any clear liberal principle. Democracy disconnected from liberalism will not protect diversity, because majorities will use their power to repress minorities. Liberalism was born in the midth century as a means of resolving religious And Its Discontents, and it was reborn again after to solve conflicts between nationalisms.

In situations of de facto diversity, attempts to impose a single way of life on an entire population is a formula for dictatorship.

They would not be as successful as they have been were they not riding a wave of discontent with some of the underlying characteristics of liberal societies. To understand this, we need to look at the historical origins of liberalism, its evolution over the decades, and its limitations as a governing doctrine.

Classical liberalism can best be understood as an institutional solution to the problem of governing over diversity. Or to put it in slightly different terms, it is a system for peacefully managing diversity in pluralistic societies. It arose in Europe in the late 17th and 18th centuries in response to the wars of religion that followed the Protestant Reformation, wars that lasted for years and killed major portions of the populations of continental Europe.

This was a period in which the adherents of forbidden sects were persecuted—heretics were regularly tortured, hanged, or burned at the stake—and their clergy hunted. The founders of modern liberalism like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke sought to lower the aspirations of politics, not to promote a good life as defined by religion, but rather to preserve life itself, since diverse populations could not agree on what the good life was.

The limits of tolerance are reached only when the principle of tolerance itself is challenged, or when citizens resort to violence to get their way. Understood in this fashion, liberalism was simply a pragmatic tool for resolving conflicts in diverse societies, one that sought to lower the temperature of politics by taking questions of final ends off the table and moving them into the sphere of private life.

There is however a deeper understanding of liberalism that developed in continental Europe that has been incorporated into modern liberal doctrine. In this view, liberalism is not simply a mechanism for pragmatically avoiding violent conflict, but also a means of protecting fundamental human dignity.

The ground of human dignity has shifted over time. In aristocratic societies, it was an attribute only of warriors who risked their lives in battle. Christianity universalized the concept of dignity based on the possibility of human moral choice: Human beings had a higher moral status than the rest of created nature but lower than that of God because they could choose between right and wrong.

Unlike beauty or intelligence or strength, this characteristic was universally shared and made human beings equal in the sight of God. Liberalism recognizes the equal dignity of every human being by granting them rights that protect individual autonomy: rights to speech, to assembly, to belief, and ultimately to participate in self-government.

Liberalism thus protects diversity by deliberately not specifying higher goals of human life. This disqualifies religiously defined communities as liberal. Liberalism also grants equal rights to all people considered full human beings, based on their capacity for individual choice. Liberalism thus tends toward a kind of universalism: Liberals care not just about their rights, but about the rights of others outside their particular communities. Thus the French Revolution carried the Rights of Man across Europe.

From the beginning the major arguments among liberals were not over this principle, but rather over who qualified as rights-bearing individuals, with various groups—racial and ethnic minorities, women, foreigners, the propertyless, children, the insane, and criminals—excluded from this magic circle.

A final characteristic of historical liberalism was its association with the right to own property. Property rights and the enforcement of contracts through legal institutions became the foundation for economic growth in Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, the United States, and other states that were not necessarily democratic but protected property rights. For that reason liberalism is strongly associated with economic growth and modernization. Rights were protected by an independent judiciary that could call on the power of the state for enforcement.

Properly understood, rule of law referred both to the application of day-to-day rules that governed interactions between individuals and to the design of political institutions that formally allocated political power through constitutions. L iberalism is connected to democracy, but is not the same thing as it.

It is possible to have regimes that are liberal but not democratic: Germany in the 19th century and Singapore and Hong Kong in the late 20th century come to mind.

Liberalism is allied to democracy through its protection of individual autonomy, which ultimately implies a right to political choice and to the franchise. But it is not the same as democracy. From the French Revolution on, there were radical proponents of democratic equality who were willing to abandon liberal rule of law altogether and vest power in a dictatorial state that would equalize outcomes.

Under the banner of Marxism-Leninism, this became one of the great fault lines of the 20th century. Liberalism also saw the rise of another competitor besides communism: nationalism. As the 19th century progressed, Europe reorganized itself from a dynastic to a national basis, with the unification of Italy and Germany and with growing nationalist agitation within the multiethnic Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires.

In this exploded into the Great War, which killed millions of people and laid the kindling for a second global conflagration in Europeans saw the folly of organizing politics around an exclusive and aggressive understanding of nation, and created the European Community and later the European Union to subordinate the old nation-states to a cooperative transnational structure.

For its part, the United States played a powerful role in creating a new set of international institutions, including the United Nations and affiliated Bretton Woods organizations like the World Bank and IMF , GATT and the World Trade Organization, and cooperative regional ventures like NATO and NAFTA. The largest threat to this order came from the former Soviet Union and its allied communist parties in Eastern Europe and the developing world.

But the former Soviet Union collapsed in , as did the perceived legitimacy of Marxism-Leninism, and many former communist countries sought to incorporate themselves into existing international institutions like the EU and NATO.

This post-Cold War world would collectively come to be known as the liberal international order. But the period from to the s was the heyday of liberal democracy in the developed world. Liberal rule of law abetted democracy by protecting ordinary people from abuse: The U. Supreme Court, for example, was critical in breaking down legal racial segregation through decisions like Brown v. Board of Education. And democracy protected the rule of law: When Richard Nixon engaged in illegal wiretapping and use of the CIA, it was a democratically elected Congress that helped drive him from power.

Liberal rule of law laid the basis for the strong post-World War II economic growth that then enabled democratically elected legislatures to create redistributive welfare states. In short, this period saw a largely happy coexistence of liberalism and democracy throughout the developed world. Liberalism has been a broadly successful ideology, and one that is responsible for much of the peace and prosperity of the modern world.

But it also has a number of shortcomings, some of which were triggered by external circumstances, and others of which are intrinsic to the doctrine.

The first lies in the realm of economics, the second in the realm of culture. They sharply denigrated the role of the state in the economy, and emphasized free markets as spurs to growth and efficient allocators of resources. But valid insights about the efficiency of markets evolved into something of a religion, in which state intervention was opposed not based on empirical observation but as a matter of principle.

Deregulation produced lower airline ticket prices and shipping costs for trucks, but also laid the ground for the great financial crisis of when it was applied to the financial sector. The period from the s onward saw the negotiation of both global and regional free trade agreements that shifted jobs and investment away from rich democracies to developing countries, increasing within-country inequalities.

In the meantime, many countries starved their public sectors of resources and attention, leading to deficiencies in a host of public services from education to health to security. The result was the world that emerged by the s in which aggregate incomes were higher than ever but inequality within countries had also grown enormously.

Many countries around the world saw the emergence of a small class of oligarchs, multibillionaires who could convert their economic resources into political power through lobbyists and purchases of media properties. Globalization enabled them to move their money to safe jurisdictions easily, starving states of tax revenue and making regulation very difficult. Globalization also entailed liberalization of rules concerning migration. The second discontent with liberalism as it evolved over the decades was rooted in its very premises.

Liberalism deliberately lowered the horizon of politics: A liberal state will not tell you how to live your life, or what a good life entails; how you pursue happiness is up to you. This produces a vacuum at the core of liberal societies, one that often gets filled by consumerism or pop culture or other random activities that do not necessarily lead to human flourishing. This leads us to a deeper stratum of discontent. Liberal theory, both in its economic and political guises, is built around individuals and their rights, and the political system protects their ability to make these choices autonomously.

Indeed, in neoclassical economic theory, social cooperation arises only as a result of rational individuals deciding that it is in their self-interest to work with other individuals. Among conservative intellectuals, Patrick Deneen has gone the furthest by arguing that this whole approach is deeply flawed precisely because it is based on this individualistic premise, and sanctifies individual autonomy above all other goods.

Thus for him, the entire American project based as it was on Lockean individualistic principles was misfounded. Human beings for him are not primarily autonomous individuals, but deeply social beings who are defined by their obligations and ties to a range of social structures, from families to kin groups to nations. This cooperation does not arise necessarily from rational calculation; it is supported by emotional faculties like pride, guilt, shame, and anger that reinforce social bonds.

The success of human beings over the millennia that has allowed our species to completely dominate its natural habitat has to do with this aptitude for following norms that induce social cooperation. By contrast, the kind of individualism celebrated in liberal economic and political theory is a contingent development that emerged in Western societies over the centuries.

Its history is long and complicated, but it originated in the inheritance rules set down by the Catholic Church in early medieval times which undermined the extended kinship networks that had characterized Germanic tribal societies.

But this kind of individualism has always been at odds with the social proclivities of human beings. It also does not come naturally to people in certain other non-Western societies like India or the Arab world, where kin, caste, or ethnic ties are still facts of life. T he implication of these observations for contemporary liberal societies is straightforward. There are parallel discontents on the left. Juridical equality before the law does not mean that people will be treated equally in practice.

The chart below shows that expectations of recoveries from bond defaults are at record lows. Credit default swaps pay cents on the dollar minus the auction value of the cheapest-to-deliver security. Loan investors also expect low recoveries -- 40 to 45 cents on the dollar compared to historical averages of 30 to 35 cents.

This is happening because of a similar trend towards loans with fewer safeguards, aka covenant-lite loans. In Corporate Defaults Slow, Lifting Debt Market , WSJ's Sam Goldfarb reports that "At the end of September, the trailing month default rate for U. Congress and the Fed have minimized defaults so far by sending cash to households and making it easier for businesses to borrow. But leverage ratios are elevated- "the average high-yield bond issuer now has debt equal to 6.

On Monday Politico's Paola Tamma reported that ECB President Christine Lagarde discussed the possibility of making EU debt permanent , signaling a reversal of her previous stance that the coronavirus borrowing is "a one-off response to exceptional circumstances.

We should discuss the possibility of it remaining in the European toolbox, so that it can be mobilized again in equivalent circumstances. In The debt bubble legacy of economists Modigliani and Miller , FT's Robin Wigglesworth explains how Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller's academic work led to a four-decade decrease in corporate creditworthiness. But a later revisitation that incorporated the tax-deductibility enjoyed by interest payments showed that the value of an indebted company is actually higher than that of an unleveraged one.

It eventually helped lay the intellectual groundwork for a dramatic erosion of corporate creditworthiness. By focusing on efficiency in a theoretical economy rather than resilience in a real one, Modigliani and Miller as well as later economists who argued that debt could ensure corporate discipline and therefore increase economic dynamism laid the intellectual groundwork for companies to leverage up and increase returns to shareholders at greater risk to the economy as a whole.

It's reflected in corporate credit ratings. Today five companies out of 5, have a AAA rating, and only 14 percent are in the A range. The statistics split by issuance and outstanding cover US Treasuries, mortgage-backed securities, corporate bonds, municipal bonds, agency-backed securities, asset-backed securities, money markets, repurchase agreements and the secured overnight financing rate.

A couple charts from the report are below. The big US banks reported earnings this week. Banks with a trading focus - Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs - did well as clients bought and sold stocks in response to the pandemic and companies went public or raised fresh capital.

Banks with a retail focus - Citigroup and Bank of America - struggled due to historically low interest rates and low consumer spending. The IMF published a Fiscal Monitor chapter today on "Fiscal Policies to Address the COVID Pandemic".

FT's Chris Giles reports that the fund has formalized its reversal on austerity. Global public debt is likely to hit a record high of percent of GDP in But government borrowing costs are expected to stay below the economic growth rate, enabling cheap borrowing to offset the weak growth and low tax revenues that the IMF predicts will result from the coronavirus pandemic.

The relevant macroeconomic context includes very low interest rates, high precautionary savings, weak private investment, and a gradual erosion of the public capital stock over time. But the novel argument in the Fiscal Monitor relates to uncertainty.

Investment multipliers are particularly high when macroeconomic uncertainty is elevated--and uncertainty in the current World Economic Outlook is "unusually large.

Reuters reports that the G20 economies are "poised to extend a multi-billion-dollar debt freeze for the world's poorest countries to help them weather the coronavirus crisis, and may adopt a common approach to dealing with longer-term debt restructurings. To repeat the summary from The Guardian,. The US is nearly nine months into a pandemic that has resulted in , deaths and 11 million fewer Americans employed million in February vs. There is no clear end in sight. At the same time, stock markets, bond markets, and house prices are at or near record highs.

What is going on? Two recent papers by Atif Mian, Ludwig Straub, and Amir Sufi might have part of the answer: The Saving Glut of the Rich and Indebted Demand.

The papers are interesting because they link wealth distribution, low interest rates, and future economic growth. Since the s, debt levels have increased and interest rates have decreased. In their indebted demand model, Mian, Straub, and Sufi explain how these divergent saving rates result in lower growth and interest rates when inequality increases:.

This channel is also active in our model, boosting demand in the short run. However, this boost reverses as monetary stimulus fades and debt needs to be serviced, beginning to drag on demand. Due to the presence of indebted demand, this drag can cause a persistent shift in natural interest rates after temporary monetary policy interventions.

It is for this reason that monetary policy has limited ammunition in the model: successive monetary policy interventions build up debt levels, thereby lowering natural rates. This forces policy rates to keep falling with them to avoid a recession, thus approaching the effective lower bound. At that point, our economy is in a debt-driven liquidity trap, or debt trap, which is a well-defined stable steady state of our economy. Reuters reports that "Long-dated sovereign bond yields in Italy and Greece touched fresh record lows on Tuesday.

German and French year yields are Yesterday, ECB Vice President Luis de Guindos said that the eurozone economy is losing momentum and the ECB will react accordingly. In Investors Prepare for Higher Treasury Yields as Election Looms , WSJ's Sam Goldfarb writes that yields have risen in response to polls showing a growing lead for Joe Biden and improving chances that Democrats do well in the Congressional races.

Biden or Mr. Trump wins. It is whether one party or another has unified control of government, making it easier to expand the federal budget deficit through tax cuts or spending programs. Since August, it has ramped up issuance of longer-term debt, widening the gap between short- and long-term yields. But many factors, including a contested or uncertain election and Federal Reserve actions, could keep interest rates low across the yield curve.

Not only is the economy suffering due to the pandemic, but its average growth rate outside of recessions has declined in recent decades. As a result, investors widely expect the central bank to hold short-term interest rates near zero for years and to keep buying Treasurys--both policies that should constrain longer-term yields.

New Bloomberg Odd Lots episode with economist and debt historian Michael Hudson. He describes how the US might go down the same route as Greece but for different reasons. Here's Joe's summary:. Hudson "makes the case that ballooning private debt burdens over time have the effect of diminishing demand, consumption, and ultimately investment, essentially creating a de facto austerity.

Instead of a government being forced into a policy of austerity in order to keep paying bond investors, it's about individuals, households, small businesses, and regional public entities like, say, the NYC subway being forced into degradation due to its debt load. In other words, austerity as an emergent phenomenon, as opposed to a discrete policy choice.

And a big part of Hudson's work has been the study of debt jubilees or forgiveness, which is an idea that gets batted around from time to time, often in the context of student loans. As he explained, the ancient king Hammurabi engaged in such jubilees, though they weren't universal. They specifically applied only to debts owed to the state after mass crises. So in other words, there's a long history of private sector obligations being taken onto the government's balance sheet in order to wipe the slate clean, and get the economy restarted after a disaster.

Another way of saying it is that the best way for the U. In Republicans are about to rediscover fiscal religion , FT's Ed Luce summarizes how the GOP's fiscal conservatism depends largely on which party is in power. The US national debt exploded during the Reagan years because of tax cuts and high defence spending. In other words, you can set your clock by it. But this clock has nothing to do with the national debt and everything to do with who benefits from the rising debt.

The SEC's Division of Economic and Risk Analysis published a staff report, U. Credit Markets: Interconnectedness and the Effects of the COVID Economic Shock. The report provides details on the issuers and holders of credit, as well as the intermediaries who facilitate credit transmission. Its goal is to assist policymakers in their efforts to understand and improve market functioning and resilience. Here's the high-level credit risk map and a couple observations they include with it:.

In How America Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Deficit , Zach Carter describes a shift that has happened in American politics and economics in the last few years.

He uses a recent CNBC interview with Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari as the main example. A conservative former Goldman Sachs banker, Kashkari has become "an outspoken advocate of aggressive deficit spending. It's like letting the forest fire just rage. Let it burn and eventually it will burn itself out and meanwhile, all the animals are dead. Kashkari is not alone in preferring to avoid placing too much emphasis on a theoretically self-correcting market.

Carter notes that. But what it means to be a conservative intellectual is changing. When he calls for aggressive federal economic management, Kashkari is not so much giving ground to the left as giving voice to an emerging bipartisan consensus from the respectable, cuff-linked political center.

Under this view, people in a democracy may disagree on just how debt and deficits should accrue, but deficits themselves are a normal feature of a functioning polity, not a dire threat to economic health. For three decades, deficit hawks made a good business in DC issuing warnings about the dangers of government debt. They consistently sounded alarms that high debt levels would force interest rates up to punishing levels, spark inflation, ignite a financial crisis, and constrain government's ability to act.

They yield not to the attack of other ideas but Economists have responded to circumstances over the past few years by updating their views on debt and the things governments can do with deficit spending. Better a few decades late than never. As Carter describes it, all that remains is for Congress to catch up. This is the theoretical rate of interest where the economy is in balance with full employment and stable prices.

The neutral rate can't be directly observed, so estimating it relies on a lot of assumptions. But if we accept the premise, there is agreement that the neutral rate has decreased significantly. A recent Fed paper estimated that the neutral rate of interest is around negative 2 percent, which effectively means that monetary policy setting nominal rates above 0 percent would be restrictive.

Discussions about the neutral rate are interesting because they're central to how central bankers try to manage the economy, but also because they're a useful component for understanding the overlap between fiscal and monetary policy. Williams provides a good summary of the way the IMF and other authorities use this concept, as well as providing a defense of the establishment view. Here's a question from Joe about the ideology embedded within the equations economists use and the resulting implicit bias.

Q: "What do you make of the critique that there is an anti-government spending, anti-labor ideology embedded in this, which then translates into actual policies of raising the interest rate too soon even though we're not at full employment, or raising the interest rate in response to stimulus, to blunt the effects of fiscal policy. Basically, [what do you make of the critique that] what appears to be science and math is really politics? A: "I'm a little skeptical that economists have this deep-seated conservative bias and view of the world A lot of heterodox people think about the classic theories of econ from the 60s and 70s, with perfect markets and everything's in equilibrium all the time But when you look around at cutting-edge econ in any field If there is a deep-seated intellectual bias inside of us, my coauthors and I weren't particularly aware of it.

On the other hand, the workhorse models that are still used by government agencies, central banks, and think tanks still generally come with assumptions -- such as zero unemployment, perfectly competitive markets, perfect foresight, perfect rationality, perfect cooperation, taxes are distortionary and create deadweight loss, public investment is wasteful, transfer programs transfer no benefits, capital markets are perfect -- that result in a pretty strong bias against public programs.

NYT's Alan Rappeport and Jeanna Smialek summarize political disagreements surrounding federal stimulus aid in Clash Over Municipal Loan Program Delays Stimulus Report. The Municipal Liquidity Facility, operated by the Fed and supported by the Treasury, is an area of significant disagreement. In addition to pushing for the Fed to offer loans with lower interest rates and longer repayment periods.

Reuters' Kate Duguid and Lawrence White reported that banks are on track for a record year of revenue from trading agency mortgage-backed securities. Agency-backed securities are backed by the US government, so they don't face default risk, but pre-payments can keep their price down. Though they may be overtaken by the Fed this year, commercial banks are still currently the largest holders of agency MBS.

And deposits are up. Savings rates are up. Everyone is kind of hoarding cash. The change in economic orthodoxy on this point in the past two years has been significant. First, the argument went, wages and prices would adjust down. Today, Georgieva agrees that. Austerity and autocracy offer comparable challenges.

In both cases, it's not that people buy less. It's that for reasons outside their control, they can't be productive. In short, the IMF has shifted from promoting spending cuts to "Spend. Keep the receipts. But spend. BIS General Manager Agustin Carstens gave a speech yesterday Maintaining sound money amid and after the pandemic. He highlights "the significant strengthening of the nexus between fiscal and monetary policy" and asks "How can the spectre of fiscal dominance be kept at bay?

At the same time, there is an ongoing debate about the need for greater coordination of fiscal and monetary policy in an environment of reduced policy space due to persistently low interest rates, with some pundits arguing in favour of overt monetary financing. This raises the general question of how central banks can best contribute to economic growth and stability, in the current situation and in general.

Is it by directly financing the government? Support for the government is justifiable in the pursuit of these goals. Otherwise, the risk arises of real or perceived fiscal dominance undermining central bank credibility as the foundation of sound money Economist J. Mason summed up the general response: "it would be an interesting exercise, and shed a lot of light on where orthodox thinking is these days, to work out exactly what are the causal links in the implicit model underlying his speech.

The debate about fiscal-monetary overlap will continue for a while because of that strengthening "nexus". The chart below shows the extent of central bank government bond purchases relative to total increases in public debt across countries.

Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren is an advocate for higher rates, at least in non-pandemic times. In remarks yesterday he argued that. On the role of Congress, Rosengren agrees with other Fed officials that fiscal policy is the right tool for the current situation:.

WSJ summary - Fed's Rosengren Says Pre-Pandemic Risk Taking Will Likely Slow Recovery Effort. Jason Furman gave a presentation at Peterson Institute today titled Global Economic Prospects , focusing on COVID and labor markets. He covers the fiscal response and non-response, labor market policy debates, and the future of fiscal policy. Here are the slides on fiscal policy, a nice overview:. In an FT interview , World Bank Chief Economist Carmen Reinhart urges developing countries to borrow money to fight the economic impact of coronavirus.

They can deal with the "unprecedented wave of debt crises and restructurings" once the pandemic has been addressed. First you worry about fighting the war, then you figure out how to pay for it. Reinhart makes the case for debt write-offs and transparency, pointing out that we're in an unprecedented situation and we need clear information to manage it. She is best known for her work with Kenneth Rogoff on the effects of financial crises and debt levels.

The Federal Reserve released the minutes of its September Federal Open Market Committee meeting today. Three takeaways. Fed Chair Jerome Powell gave a speech yesterday at the National Association for Business Economics' Annual Meeting.

He provides an assessment of the response to the economic fallout from Covid and discusses the path ahead. Too little support would lead to a weak recovery, creating unnecessary hardship for households and businesses.

Over time, household insolvencies and business bankruptcies would rise, harming the productive capacity of the economy, and holding back wage growth. By contrast, the risks of overdoing it seem, for now, to be smaller. Even if policy actions ultimately prove to be greater than needed, they will not go to waste. The recovery will be stronger and move faster if monetary policy and fiscal policy continue to work side by side to provide support to the economy until it is clearly out of the woods.

Last week the IMF's Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva published a blog post titled Reform of the International Debt Architecture is Urgently Needed. She and her coauthors explain that the increases in debt levels related to the pandemic will hit emerging market economies especially hard.

Just as they are starting to recover from the pandemic, many of these countries could suffer a second wave of economic distress, triggered by defaults, capital flight, and fiscal austerity. Preventing such a crisis can make the difference between a lost decade and a rapid recovery that puts countries on a sustainable growth trajectory. The blog introduces a report, The International Architecture for Resolving Sovereign Debt Involving Private-Sector Creditors. It evaluates the existing debt restructuring framework and proposes reforms such as enhancing collective action clauses to improve coordination among bondholders and increasing transparency around debt amounts, terms, and holders.

It ends with a warning about the scale of COVID-related debt:. These instruments raise significant legal and policy issues, would require careful consideration, and would be expected to be used only as a last resort and on a time-bound basis to address the unique challenges posed by the crisis. The Financial Times and Guardian summarize why reforms to sovereign debt restructuring matter:.

FT: "The magnitude of the economic shock from the Covid pandemic has badly weakened the often already fragile public finances of many poor and emerging countries. While welcome steps have been taken to avoid immediate liquidity crises, the pandemic's drawn-out nature means we are only at the start of the financial problems it will leave behind Danske explains that central banks have the power to cap borrowing costs, effectively keeping interest rates below growth rates. This strategy, which has the unfortunate name "financial repression", can enable countries to gradually grow or inflate their way out of debt.

However, Danske also argues that "counting on interest rates to stay low forever can be a dangerous strategy and financial repression is not without costs, especially if it leads to an erosion of central bank independence. Despite risks, Danske views the interest rate-growth differential as "a key variable that distinguishes sustainable debt levels from unsustainable ones.

A persistently negative interest rate-growth differential makes it possible to roll over debt while decreasing it as a share of GDP. As shown in the chart below, countries like the UK have had much higher debt levels in earlier times and been fine. The Fed adopted YCC in April to support war financing, agreeing to cap the Treasury bill yield at 0. When the war was over and the economy rebounded, inflation did as well. This started a conflict between the Fed, which wanted to raise short-term rates to combat high inflation, and the Treasury, which wanted to maintain low Treasury yields.

Eventually, the YCC policy was abandoned in February , but the Fed's experience in the s and 50s illustrates the risks fiscal dominance can have to central bank independence. Two thoughts on this report: First, something that Danske doesn't mention but might be interesting to think about is the counterfactual: what if the US Treasury had raised taxes in the late s instead of not raising taxes and pressuring the Fed to keep rates low. Taking money out of the economy when it was overheating might have reduced inflation, enabling the Fed to keep rates low for longer.

Second, the report begins to call into question the purpose of central bank independence. But I wonder if it prevents useful discussion about the overlap between fiscal and monetary policy, and to what extent the Federal Reserve should support the Treasury. For example, if we had to choose between an independent central bank and high unemployment Volcker or a collaborative central bank and low unemployment Powell , maybe we shouldn't dismiss the collaborative option too quickly.

BBC tweeted a video in which UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak promises to "protect the public finances, over the medium term getting our borrowing and debt back under control. Low interest rates make borrowing to invest desirable Public investment can encourage investment from businesses that might otherwise postpone their hiring and investment plans.

Chris Giles at the Financial Times summarizes the report, writing that. He added "The report marked a shift away from the IMF's normal concerns about public finances in rich countries. The IMF's deputy director of fiscal affairs Paolo Mauro explained that the high level of uncertainty in the global economy strengthened the case for increasing public investment.

Since , central banks have propped up the global financial system with "a remarkable display of technocratic energy and imagination.

In A Popular History of the Fed , Anton Jäger and Noam Maggor write that the Fed's actions to avoid financial collapse in the US and safeguard assets abroad have "warmed even some on the left to central bank power" while raising questions of how to make the Fed work for everyone rather than primarily the wealthy.

The quiet consensus is that central bank stabilization remains necessary for the survival of the current economy.

Liberalism and Its Discontents - American Purpose

05/10/2020 · Liberalism and Its Discontents. The challenges from the left and the right. Francis Fukuyama. 05 Oct 2020, 12:15 am. Today, there is a broad consensus that democracy is under attack or in retreat in many parts of the world. It is being contested not just by authoritarian states like China and Russia, but by populists who have been elected in ...

Politics and its Discontents Reflections, Observations, and Analyses Pertaining to the Canadian Political Scene. Saturday, September 11, An Eloquent, Earnest Plea. Although it will likely fall on the deaf ears that it is intended to reach, this by Dr. Michael Warner is for the unhinged who are harassing healthcare workers. 09/12/ · The report provides details on the issuers and holders of credit, as well as the intermediaries who facilitate credit transmission. Its goal is to assist policymakers in their efforts to understand and improve market functioning and resilience. By the end of , aggregate US credit outstanding was $54 trillion. 23/08/ · Imperialism and its discontents. On the night of 14 August , enslaved Africans gathered in the Bois Caïman forest and planned the revolt that would begin the Haitian Revolution. Last week, on the th anniversary of this meeting, Haiti was hit by an earthquake that has upturned the lives of more than a million people.

What Liberalism Was

They highlight the following developments in the third quarter:. Jamie Galbraith agrees with the conclusion but calls the underlying economics a mess.

That [loanable funds] theory, which has been the source of deficit- and debt-hysteria for several centuries, in turn underpins the newly-proposed FS debt-service-to-GDP ratio criterion for fiscal policy. It will be nothing but a source of trouble, unless And Its Discontents of There are two problems with the argument. The first is that there is no long-term trend in US private savings, nor in the import of savings from overseas - which would show up as an increasing US current account deficit relative to GDP - nor in the ratio of private debt to GDP One way to put it, is to say that "loanable funds" is a theory of the sport market But this is precisely what FS are trying to explain In How Much Debt is Too MuchRaghuram Rajan writes And Its Discontents.

But the fact is that there is always a limit, and it may come into view sooner than many realize. Shawnee Smith Hot Romanchuk responds, pointing out Amestris Rp Rajan Accuses MMT of Making Errors Made By Mainstream.

In this case, that would have been useful -- since he accuses MMTers of making basic analytical errors. Unfortunately for his case, those errors are actually made by mainstream economists, and MMTers take the other side of debates. Bloomberg hosted a debate on the national debt asking whether we should stop worrying about national deficits.

Stephanie Kelton and Jamie Galbraith argued for the motion, facing off against Otmar Issing and Todd Buchholz arguing against. Paul Krugman explains why And Its Discontents act responsibly, we must stop worrying and learn to love debt. Michael Pettis explains why Xi's aim to double China's economy is a fantasy unless Beijing boosts consumption by raising the household share of income from 50 to 70 percent -- a move that local governments and elites have resisted.

When this happens, total debt in the economy must grow faster than GDP. So the debt burden rose. Either way, the economy was forced finally to rebalance away from investment and towards consumption amid far slower, And Its Discontents even negative, growth. New household debt and credit data release from the New York Fed.

The data likely reflect improvements in economic activity and the labor market, as well as the positive impacts of relief measures provided through CARES Act provisions or offered voluntarily by lenders.

We've been trained to believe that negative interest rates are weird. In On Negative RatesJ. Mason explains why positive interest rates for government bonds might be the stranger phenomenon.

He makes the case for why we shouldn't think about finance as time travelat least when thinking about interest rates for government bonds. A couple notes from the post. Many people still have this kind of mental model in thinking Maddy Belle Sex government debt.

In this case the And Its Discontents cost would be negative. Desperate And Its Discontents generate higher returns during a decade of rock-bottom interest rates, money managers bargained away legal protections, accepted ever-widening loopholes, and turned a blind eye to questionable earnings projections. Debt issued by retailers like Men's Wearhouse, J. Penney, and Neiman Marcus is trading for pennies or fractions of pennies on the dollar.

The chart below shows that expectations of recoveries from bond defaults are at record lows. Credit default swaps pay cents on the dollar minus the auction value of the cheapest-to-deliver security. Loan investors also expect low recoveries -- 40 to 45 cents on the dollar compared to historical averages of 30 to 35 cents. This is happening And Its Discontents of a similar trend towards loans with fewer safeguards, aka covenant-lite loans.

In Corporate Defaults Slow, Lifting Debt MarketWSJ's Sam Goldfarb reports that "At the end of September, the trailing month default rate for U.

Congress and the Fed have minimized Amialovesall so far by sending cash to households and making it easier for businesses to Teen Feet Slave. But leverage ratios are elevated- "the average high-yield bond issuer now has debt equal to 6. On Monday Politico's Paola Tamma reported that ECB President Christine Lagarde discussed the possibility of making EU debt permanentsignaling a reversal of her previous stance that the coronavirus borrowing is "a one-off response to exceptional circumstances.

We should discuss And Its Discontents possibility of it remaining in the European toolbox, so that it can be mobilized again in equivalent circumstances. In The debt bubble legacy of economists Modigliani and MillerFT's Robin Wigglesworth explains how Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller's academic work led to a four-decade decrease in corporate creditworthiness. But a later revisitation that incorporated the tax-deductibility enjoyed by interest payments showed that the And Its Discontents of an indebted company is actually higher than that of an unleveraged one.

It eventually helped lay the intellectual groundwork for a dramatic erosion of corporate creditworthiness. By focusing on efficiency in a theoretical economy rather than resilience in a real one, Modigliani and Miller as well as later economists who argued that debt could ensure corporate discipline and therefore increase economic dynamism laid the intellectual groundwork for companies to leverage up and increase returns to shareholders at greater risk to the economy as a whole.

It's reflected in corporate credit ratings. Today five companies out of 5, have a AAA rating, and only 14 percent are in the A range. The statistics And Its Discontents by issuance and outstanding cover US Treasuries, mortgage-backed securities, corporate bonds, Waldmichlsholdi bonds, agency-backed Bestiality Comic, asset-backed securities, money markets, repurchase agreements and the secured overnight financing rate.

A couple Dildokissen from the report are And Its Discontents. The big US banks reported earnings this week. Banks with a trading focus - Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs - did well as clients bought and sold stocks in response to the pandemic and companies went public or raised fresh capital.

Banks with a retail focus Nakte Frauen Citigroup and Bank of America - struggled due to historically low interest rates and low consumer spending.

The IMF published a Fiscal Monitor chapter today on "Fiscal Chubby Solo Porn to Address the COVID Pandemic". FT's Chris Giles reports that the fund has formalized its reversal on austerity. Global public debt is likely to hit a record high of percent of GDP in But government borrowing costs Sexy Hausfrauen Nackt expected to stay below the economic growth rate, enabling cheap borrowing to And Its Discontents the weak growth and low tax revenues that the IMF predicts will result from the coronavirus pandemic.

The relevant macroeconomic context includes very low interest rates, high precautionary savings, weak private investment, and a gradual erosion of the public capital stock over time. But the novel argument in the Fiscal Monitor relates to uncertainty. Investment multipliers are particularly high when macroeconomic uncertainty is elevated--and uncertainty in the current World Economic Outlook is "unusually large. Reuters reports that the G20 economies are "poised to extend a multi-billion-dollar debt freeze for the world's poorest countries to help them weather the coronavirus Aloha Arab Sex, and may adopt a common approach to dealing with longer-term debt restructurings.

To repeat the summary from The Guardian. The US is nearly nine months into a pandemic that has resulted indeaths and 11 million fewer Americans employed million in February vs. There is no clear end in sight. At the same time, stock markets, bond markets, and house prices are at or near record highs.

What is going on? Two recent papers by Atif Mian, Ludwig Straub, and Amir Sufi might have part of the answer: The Saving Glut of the Bezahlter Sex and Indebted Demand. The papers are interesting because they link wealth distribution, low interest rates, and future economic growth.

Since the s, debt levels have increased and interest rates have decreased. In their indebted demand model, Mian, Straub, and Sufi explain how these divergent saving rates result in lower growth and interest rates when inequality increases:.

This channel is also active in our model, boosting demand in the short run. However, this boost reverses as monetary stimulus fades and debt needs to be serviced, beginning to drag on demand.

Due to the presence of indebted demand, this drag can cause a persistent shift in natural interest rates after temporary monetary policy interventions. It is for this reason that monetary policy has limited ammunition in And Its Discontents model: successive monetary policy interventions build up debt levels, thereby lowering natural rates. This forces policy rates to keep falling with them to avoid And Its Discontents recession, thus approaching the effective lower bound.

At that point, our economy is in a Hucow Breeding liquidity trap, or debt And Its Discontents, which is a well-defined stable steady state of our economy.

Reuters reports that "Long-dated sovereign bond yields in Italy and Greece touched fresh record lows on Tuesday. German and French year yields are Yesterday, ECB Vice President Luis de Guindos said that the eurozone economy is losing momentum and the ECB will react accordingly. In Investors Prepare for Higher And Its Discontents Yields as Election LoomsWSJ's Sam Goldfarb writes that yields have risen in response to polls showing a growing lead for Joe Biden and improving chances that Democrats do well in the Congressional races.

Biden or Mr. Trump wins. Freundin Will Dreier is whether one party or another has unified control of government, making it easier to expand the federal budget deficit through tax cuts or spending programs. Since August, it has ramped up issuance of longer-term debt, widening the gap between short- and long-term yields. Sophie Howard Beach many factors, including a contested or uncertain election Sandro Hersel Federal Reserve actions, could keep interest rates low across the yield curve.

Not only Geiler Mann the economy suffering due to the pandemic, but its average growth rate outside of recessions has declined in recent decades. As a result, investors widely expect the central bank to hold short-term interest rates near zero for years and to keep buying Treasurys--both policies that should constrain longer-term yields.

New Bloomberg Odd Lots episode with economist and debt historian Michael Hudson. He describes how the US might go down the same route as Granny Bbc Gangbang but for different reasons.

Here's Joe's summary:. Hudson "makes the case that ballooning private debt burdens over time have the effect of diminishing demand, consumption, and ultimately investment, essentially creating a de facto austerity. Instead of a government being forced into a policy of austerity in order to keep paying bond investors, it's about individuals, households, small businesses, and regional public entities like, say, the NYC subway being forced into degradation due to its debt load. In other words, austerity as an emergent phenomenon, as opposed to a discrete policy choice.

And a big part of Hudson's Bravoteen has been the study of debt jubilees or forgiveness, which is an idea that gets batted around from And Its Discontents to time, often in the context of student loans. As he explained, the ancient king Hammurabi engaged in such jubilees, though they weren't universal.

They specifically applied only to debts owed to the state after mass crises. So in other words, there's a long history Serviporno private sector obligations being taken onto the government's balance sheet in order to wipe the slate And Its Discontents, and get the economy restarted after a disaster.

Another way of saying it is that the best way for the U. In Republicans are about to rediscover fiscal religionFT's Ed Luce summarizes how the GOP's fiscal conservatism depends largely on which party is in power. The US national debt exploded during the Reagan years And Its Discontents of tax cuts and high defence spending.