Tag Archives: Congressional Budget Office

Neither the White House nor the CBO have adequately considered the real impact of the very deficits they themselves are projecting. While they admit the deficits will be off the charts they fail to connect the dots from that admission to its obvious natural consequences — no fewer than FIVE ominous, vicious cycles.

Inflation lurks in the shadows. It destroys value by gradually eroding real returns over time. It is financial death by a thousand cuts. Investors too often look at "the numbers" in their portfolio without asking what those numbers can actually buy over time. It's a classic mistake that John Maynard Keynes termed "money illusion."

It now seems like the U.S. might be getting closer to acknowledging that it has a serious fiscal problem; or at least this is what one might infer from the strong support from Congressmen and Senators from both sides of the aisle, thousands of business leaders and economists from all stripes, as well as from fifteen Nobel Laureates in Economics, for a new bill called the Intergenerational Financial Obligations Reform Act or “Inform Act” - in spite of the fact that the proposal is being totally ignored by the mainstream media and, as evidenced by the case of Detroit, the longer we wait, the worse it gets.

Does anyone believe the government cares about deficits? Does the American media care? If they do, why don’t you read reports like the following? Words: 970

I believe our fiscal situation is much worse than most people realize. True, the situation might be resolvable with a hard-nosed turnaround specialist in charge [Romney?] but, even here, the emphasis is on “might”! In a political context, where citizens have been conditioned to believe they are entitled to live at the expense of government (i.e other citizens because, after all, government has nothing that it first does not take from someone else), the situation is beyond hopeless. Let me address the true economic situation of the U.S. by way of an email I received from a regular reader recently. Words: 615

When people find themselves in a situation where they feel they don't have a decent grip on the risks they face, or where a great deal of critical information is hidden from view, emotions can easily overwhelm rational decision-making. Is it so farfetched to think that a sudden loss of confidence in the United States' ability to manage its finances could evoke similar fears about just how large and widespread the fallout might be? Words: 1026

A recent research paper* by the Bank for International Settlements, entitled "The Future of Public Debt: Prospects and Implications" paints a terrifying prospect for the inhabitants of most of the developed world with deficits spiralling out of control for every western industrialized country under study and inflation a foregone conclusion as a result. Words: 1128

Governments the world over have spent the past year bailing out, backstopping, insuring, and stimulating their financial sectors and economies throwing around trillions of dollars, euros, yen, and pounds like Halloween candy. Officials have assured us there’s little risk to that strategy but I believe that the opposite is true - that if you borrow and spend too much, all you’re going to do is transform a Wall Street debt crisis into a Washington debt crisis. Words: 882

Secretly, the Fed is in a panic to ward off a bond market collapse! They know that, sooner or later, they MUST send the message that they're serious about cutting back on their mad money printing. The danger of course, is that foreign investors will get an entirely different message: that Washington's efforts to fight the most severe recession since the Great Depression are waning. If that happens, you could see turmoil — not just in the bond market, but in every asset class imaginable. Words: 770