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We could, of course, always make the payments, simply by printing more money - we simply promise to pay people by giving them dollar bills - but that could set off inflation.
It is a set of policies formulated between 15th and 19th streets by the U.S. Treasury, and World Bank. Countries should focus on stabilization, liberalization, privatization.
When you don't have equality of opportunity because you don't have equal access to education, it just seems so outrageous. It weakens our economy and leads to more inequality.
My teachers helped guide and motivate me; but the responsibility of learning was left with me, an approach to learning which was later reinforced by my experiences at Amherst.
If you're injured in an automobile accident, and you sue the driver, you get much more for your injury than if you're fighting for your country. There's a double standard here.
The striking thing about America is - it's historically, extraordinary unusual, I don't of any other instance - is that productivity of workers and wages have not moved in tandem.
Donald Trump's astonishing victory in the U.S. presidential election has made one thing abundantly clear: too many Americans - particularly white male Americans - feel left behind.
As a rich country, we can, in some sense, "afford" the war. But spending money on the war means that we are not spending money on other things that we could have spent the money on.
There is a broad consensus, not only in the United States but in most of the world, that if you are in an economic downturn, you need to stimulate. Germany seems to be an exception.
No one would look just at a firm's revenues to assess how well it was doing. Far more relevant is the balance sheet, which shows assets and liability. That is also true for a country.
The financial sector has so distorted salaries that physicists are getting drawn into the financial sector. All that has led to an undersupply of people committed to the public sector.
The budgetary cost to the UK of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through 2010 will total more than £18 billion. If we include the social costs the total impact will exceed £20 billion.
For Obama, the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement - unilaterally abrogated by Trump - was part of the 'pivot to Asia,' a re-assertion of the role of America in that part of the world.
High levels of economic inequality lead to imbalances in political power, as those at the top use their economic weight to shape our politics in ways that give them more economic power.
The Clinton years were not an economic Nirvana; as chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers during part of this time, I'm all too aware of mistakes and lost opportunities.
If Trump wants to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement, the rest of the world should impose a carbon-adjustment tax on U.S. exports that do not comply with global standards.
Health care is very different from other sectors of the economy in several respects, one of which is the fact that the risk can be very high beyond people's ability. That leads to insurance.
What most Americans mean when they say "the end of the recession" is, "When will it be back to normal? When can we get jobs? When will the employment rate be back to 4 percent or 5 percent?"
It's very clear that TPP was promoted by corporate interests, it was driven by ideology, not by economic science. And when they started looking at the net trade benefits, they are miniscule.
I went to Amherst because my brother had gone there before me, and he went there because his guidance counselor thought that we would do better there than at a large university like Harvard.
There must have been something in the air of Gary that led one into economics: the first Nobel Prize winner, Paul Samuelson, was also from Gary, as were several other distinguished economists.
America has had to turn to foreigners to finance its debt - not surprising since household saving in the last years has plummeted to zero. China is one of the largest holders of American debt.
When you're facing the threat of recession, you need to have an expansionary monetary and fiscal policy. Pre-Keynesian, Hooverite views are dead everywhere except on 19th Street in Washington.
I went to public schools, and while Gary was, like most American cities, racially segregated, it was at least socially integrated - a cross section of children from families of all walks of life.
My research in this period centered around growth, technical change, and income distribution, both how growth affected the distribution of income and how the distribution of income affected growth.
Technology has been advancing so fast that the number of jobs globally in manufacturing is declining. There is no way that Trump can bring significant numbers of manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.
Let me put it very forcefully: No large economy has ever recovered from an economic downturn through austerity. It's not going to happen in the United States, and it's not going to happen in Europe.
Obama had to save the banks, sure, but he didn't have to save the bankers and the shareholders and the bondholders. We broke the rules of capitalism in order to save those at the top - as we always do.
A politically astute president who understood deeply the economics and politics of corporate tax reform could conceivably muscle Congress toward a reform package that made sense. Trump is not that leader.
Moreover, because we chose to finance the way by borrowing, our deficits and debt has soared, and this means we have less room for maneuver, less money available to stimulate the eocnomy in the way needed.
Europe can't rely on a Trump-led U.S. for its defence. But, at the same time, it should recognise that the cold war is over - however unwilling to acknowledge it America's industrial-military complex may be.
The grand larceny that occurred in Russia, the corruption that resulted in nine or ten people getting enormous wealth through loans-for-shares, was condoned because it allowed the reelection of Boris Yeltsin.
I understand why political leaders in the beginning want to be cheerleaders to generate optimism. But to admit that they didn't understand the depths of the problem afterwards, I found a little bit surprising.
As I noted in my Nobel lecture, an early insight in my work on the economics of information concerned the problem of appropriability - the difficulty that those who pay for information have in getting returns.
These debt obligations will simply erode America's standard of living in the future. Money spent to service the debt is money that we don't have to spend on consumption's goods, or on investment in our future.
After the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the shutdown of much of New York City by Sandy in 2012, and now the devastation wrought on Texas by Harvey, the U.S. can and should do better.
The only people benefiting in Iraq war are George Bush's Jr. friends in the oil industry. He has done the American economy and the global economy an enormous disfavor, but his Texan friends couldn't be happier.
Unfettered market American-style capitalism doesn't work. Developing countries can't afford that kind of luxury. They just can't afford it. Period. If there's a mistake, they can't afford to put out $2 trillion.
In an economy, when the government spends more and invests in the economy, that money circulates, and recirculates again and again. So not only does it create jobs once: the investment creates jobs multiple times.
The recovery of the banks is what happens when you reduce competition, lend money to them at zero interest rates, allow them to gamble. That particular style of restoration actually inhibits the economic recovery.
Trump has been criticized by mainstream Republicans for not really being one of them. But he is definitely one of them when it comes to the central palliative for any ill befalling the country: a tax cut for the rich.
The IP standards advanced countries favour typically are designed not to maximise innovation and scientific progress, but to maximise the profits of big pharmaceutical companies and others able to sway trade negotiations.
Similarly, payments for a dead soldier amount to only $500,000, which is far less than standard estimates of the lifetime economic cost of a death. This statistical value of a life in the US amounts to circa $6.5 million.
Ensuring preschool education for all and investing more in public schools is essential if the U.S. is to avoid becoming a neo-feudal country where advantages and disadvantages are passed on from one generation to the next.
People at the top spend less money than those at the bottom, so when you have redistribution toward the top, aggregate demand goes down. Unless you intervene, you're going to have a weak economy unless something else happens.
For the president of the United States, reputation does matter. The reputation of the United States does matter. We are dealing with countries all over the world. They want to know if your word is good. Trump's word is not good.
What's going to happen is that there will be a definite consensus that Europe is not working. The diagnosis will be to shed the currency and keep the rest, or that Europe is not working and a broader rejection - like in the U.K.
China-led globalization in some ways worries me because they are not concerned about human rights, labor rights. They probably aren't even really concerned about competitive marketplaces. So in some ways, they're like Mr. Trump.
I don't think if we had been able to make that choice rationally, we would have said that's what we want to do. We would have said: "Can't we save the banks and solve our health care problems?" The answer is yes. You could have.
It's very hard to persuade a young person who has seen the Great Recession, who has seen all the problems with inequality, to tell them inequality is not important and that markets are always efficient. They'd think you're crazy.