Employment

I’ve been pretty busy, and in lieu of writing a real post, I’ll mostly quote Yves Smith : The reason most people don’t like government deficits is that they are assumed to crowd out private sector borrowing, thus discouraging business investment. But companies in the US, even in the last expansion, were net savers. That pattern has taken hold in advanced economies, even in many emerging economies ex China, since the mid 2000s, and some as early as the late 1990s. Andrew Haldane, the director of financial stability for the Bank of England, confirmed that companies and investors are taking an excessively short-term perspective, which is leading to underinvestment. In simple terms, the household sector always wants to save. If the business sector also perversely wants to save, then government needs to take up the slack and deficit spend, otherwise wages and GDP will contract (if you run a big trade surplus, you can escape that conundrum, but that isn’t germane for the US). If GDP contract...