The long economic expansion was fueled by an unprecedented rise in private expenditure relative to income, financed by a growing flow of net credit to the private. On the surface, it seemed that the growing burden of the household sector's debt was counterbalanced by a spectacular rise in the...

These are fast moving times. Two years ago, the U.S. Congressional Budget Office (CBO, 2001) projected a federal budget surplus of $172 billion for fiscal year 2003. One year ago, the projected figure had changed to a deficit of $145 billion (CBO 2002). The actual figure, near the end of fiscal...

Wynne Godley, our Levy Institute colleague, has warned since 1999 that the falling personal saving and rising borrowing trends that had powered the US economic expansion were not sustainable. He also warned that when these trends were reversed, as has happened in other countries, the expansion...

This paper provides the details of the construction of new quarterly measures of the real GDPs of the 36 US trading partners that are taken into consideration by the Federal Reserve in its "broad exchange rate" indexes. These new measures have some important advantages. First, they allow the...

The current account deficit of the United States has been growing steadily as a share of GDP for more than a decade. It is now at an all-time high, over 5 percent of GDP (see Figure 1). This steady deterioration has been greeted with an increasing amount of concern (U.S Trade Deficit Review...