Tag Archives: fiscal balance

Vintage Bill Vickrey quote.Lars P. Syll’s BlogWhy so-called​ deficits​ are economic necessitiesLars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

Last Friday July 27, 2018), the US Bureau of Economic Analysis published their latest national accounts data – Gross Domestic Product: Second Quarter 2018 (Advance Estimate), which tells us that the annualised real GDP growth rate for the US was a very strong 4.1 per cent in the was 3 per cent in the June-quarter 2018. Note this is not the annual growth over the last four-quarters, which is a more modest 2.8 per cent (up from 2.6 per cent in the previous quarter). As this is only the...

What I want to highlight here is this: the private sector needs government deficit spending if it is going to recover properly from both the heart attack of the Financial Crisis and the decades of disease brought on by income redistribution and rising debt levels. This is so because government deficits are private-sector surpluses. The logic is really very simple. What number do you get when you add up every trade surplus and trade deficit on the planet? Zero, of course, because one...