My latest in The StarPhoenix When I was growing up, the United States was larger than life. It was the peak of the Cold War and we thought at the time only Ronald Reagan, the United States military and our Canada Cup hockey team was standing between us and the evil Soviets. Fast forward and [...]
debt
A Primer on the U.S. Debt Ceiling
A great primer from the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein. What happens if we don’t raise the debt ceiling but continue to pay interest on our bonds? This is an option known as “prioritization.” The Bipartisan Policy Center released a reportattempting to think through how this would work in practice, as it has never been attempted [...]
Ten Trillion & Counting
Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE. PBS has an exceptional program on the U.S. national debt and it’s implications for the future of not only the United States but for much of the world. It’s staggering how the Bush administration took politics over economics every single time. As former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neil said, [...]
Column: There has to be more than tax cuts
My latest column in The StarPhoenix. I’ll add in some extra link later today but for now I need to get some work done for my other employer. Since the end of the Super Bowl, I have been following the National Football League lockout and the litigation surrounding it. I have concluded that the hard-line [...]
The Shape of Things To Come
60 Minutes had a feature on the budget crisis’ that are happening at the state level. Stay with me on this one. "The most alarming thing about the state issue is the level of complacency," Meredith Whitney, one of the most respected financial analysts on Wall Street and one of the most influential women in [...]
Canada’s Personal Debt Crisis
According to the Globe and Mail Sometimes, recessions can breed a hunker-down-and-save mentality. Not so this time. Canadian household debt – a perennial worry in recent years – has ballooned to a point where it’s now more than double 1989 levels – just as rising borrowing costs are set to squeeze budgets, a national report [...]
Deficits are Devine
Well it’s official, deficit financing on the scale not seen since the Devine era is back in Saskatchewan. The government of Saskatchewan is going to run a billion dollar deficit this year based on the fall of potash prices. As told by the Star Phoenix. The release of the government’s mid-year financial report Thursday shows [...]
The young and the unemployed
From the Toronto Star With about a million British youth unemployed, ours is hardly an isolated crisis. A recent editorial in the conservative U.K. Economist says the "plight of the jobless young … invokes talk of a lost generation." It notes the well-known phenomenon that "prolonged unemployment early in people’s working lives will leave them [...]
Tall Skinny Bailout
Andrew Jones is blogging on the debt dependent church. Here are some of the gems from the post I have seen a number of Seminary graduates come overseas to hang with us and to potentially find work in the "emerging church". After a short time, they have gone back to USA disappointed that there are [...]
