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Last week after the Thanksgiving holidays, the Supreme Court started to hear oral arguments in Stop the Beach Renourishment v. Florida Dep’t of Environmental Protection, a case of eminent domain.  This is the biggest case since the court extended the use of eminent domain in the landmark Kelo v. City of New London case in [...]

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This quote from President Obama comes via Brad DeLong:
We’ve got a long- term structural deficit that is primarily being driven by health care costs, and our long-term entitlement programs. All right? So that’s the baseline.
Now, if we can’t grow our economy, then it is going to be that much harder for us to reduce the [...]

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In the past few weeks I have been alarmed about the growing debate about deficits and taxes, so much so that I have moved to a double dip baseline from one of a multi-year recovery.  I find it in total disregard of past economic history that we are moving in this direction so quickly.
So, [...]

As we discuss sovereign debt levels, currencies and competitiveness, it bears remembering that interest rates are at the heart of many of these debates. To the degree debt service costs are the only measure used to determine how high a debt burden is, you are going to run into problems with low interest rates. The lower the rate of interest, the higher the debt load a given repayment schedule can service. Focussing only on debt service costs is clearly bubble mentality that led to huge credit growth in the household sector in the past decade. If this same mentality creeps into the debate on public sector debt burdens, expect the same results.

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Barack Obama has now come clean about his thinking on why his administration has decided to focus first on reducing the deficit and next on jobs. He fears a double-dip recession will occur if foreigners lose confidence in the U.S. dollar, causing interest rates to spike. 
This is nonsense and it demonstrates how much at [...]

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Nouriel Roubini, writing in the New York Daily News , said on Sunday that “unemployed Americans should hunker down for more job losses” given the likelihood of a job less recovery. This was as gloomy a piece as I have seen from Roubini in the past few months. He has clearly become more downbeat about [...]

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Today, I want to run a few thoughts by you courtesy of John Mauldin.  In his recent weekly newsletter, he makes a number of points I have made here over the past few weeks and comes to a similar conclusion about the weakness of recovery and the likelihood of a double dip recession.
John Mauldin, Best-Selling [...]

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The motivating factor?  this article in Politico:
President Barack Obama plans to announce in next year’s State of the Union address that he wants to focus extensively on cutting the federal deficit in 2010 – and will downplay other new domestic spending beyond jobs programs, according to top aides involved in the planning.
The president’s plan, which [...]

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L. Randall Wray has a post up at New Deal 2.0 which puts forward an idea which is pretty innovative. I would label it a private sector replacement for unemployment insurance. It’s the kind of thinking that might bring Obama out of a policy cul-de-sac as the economy hemorrhages jobs.
Let me present an excerpted version [...]

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The following is a re-print of the latest monthly newsletter from Niels Jensen of Absolute Return Partners, published with the express permission of the author. Visit www.arpllp.com to learn more about Absolute Return Partners. You can reach the firm by email at info@arpllp.com.
This post on taxes and budget deficits should remind one of three recent [...]