With economic growth having cooled to less than 1 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...

In recent years, the US public debt has grown rapidly, with last fiscal year's deficit reaching nearly $1.3 trillion. Meanwhile, many of the euro nations with large amounts of public debt have come close to bankruptcy and loss of capital market access. The same may soon be true of many US states...

Since the current recession began in December 2007, New Deal legislation and its effectiveness have been at the center of a lively debate in Washington. This paper emphasizes some key facts about two kinds of policy that were important during the Great Depression and have since become the focus...

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...

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...

Longstanding speculation about the likelihood of a housing market collapse has given way in the past few months to consideration of just how far the housing market will fall and how much damage the debacle will inflict on the economy. In this paper, we discuss recent developments related to the...

This paper considers a plan proposed by Warren Buffett, in which importers would be required to obtain certificates proportional to the amount of non-oil goods (and possibly also services) they brought into the country. These certificates would be granted to firms that exported goods. Exporting...

In this new Strategic Analysis, we review what we believe is the most important economic policy issue facing policymakers in the United States and abroad: the prospect of a growth recession in the United States, linked to the imbalances in the U.S. current account, government, and private sector...

This Strategic Analysis provides a retrospective view of U.S. growth in the last 10 years, showing that the authors’ previous work, grounded in the linkages between growth and the financial balances of the private, public, and foreign sectors of the economy, has proven a useful contribution to...

A wave of revisionist work claims that "anti-competitive" New Deal legislation such as the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) greatly slowed the recovery from the Depression; in this new public policy brief, President Dimitri B. Papadimitriou and...