Europeans have a tendency to call the financial crisis a US problem, or a crisis precipitated by the "Anglo-Saxon" model. The data suggest otherwise. Moreover, the corporate sector in Europe has a much lower capacity to finance investment from internal sources of funds, which implies that a...

In 1937, in the midst of the US recovery from the Great Depression, President Roosevelt implemented spending cuts in pursuit of a balanced budget. Subsequently, the unemployment rate jumped nearly 6 percentage points over the next year and the US economy re-entered a major recession. In the...