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...

With economic growth having cooled to 0.7 percent in the first quarter of 2007, the economy can ill afford a slump in consumption by the American household. But it now appears that the household sector could finally give in to the pressures of rising gasoline prices, a weakening home market, and...

As we projected in a previous strategic analysis, the U.S. economy experienced growth rates higher than 4 percent in 2004. The question we want to raise in this strategic analysis is whether these rates will persist or come back down. We believe that several signs point in the latter direction....

In its November 2007 Strategic Analysis, the Levy Institute's Macro-Modeling Team called for an immediate, sustained fiscal stimulus of 2 percent of GDP, as well as a plan for a much larger additional fiscal stimulus should the economic slowdown continue over the next two to three years. Since...

This paper presents a framework to assess the likely impact of fiscal austerity in the Euro area, as a response to the turmoil in the financial markets. We provide some evidence on the sequence of events which generated public deficits and debts, and show that rising debts and deficits were the...

Greece's unemployment rate just hit 27.6 percent. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Why has the troika--the European Commission, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and European Central Bank--been so consistently wrong about the effects of its handpicked policies? The strategy being imposed...