Word: deficits
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...Under Control In mid-September, the DPJ will take over officially, with the Diet's election of Hatoyama as Prime Minister and the appointment of ministers. That leaves 100 days for the new administration to draft a budget for the next fiscal year that doesn't increase the national deficit - now at 180% of GDP, the highest ratio among developed countries - but still provides funds for costly election-year promises. The deadline is all the more pressing because Japan's still anemic economic recovery could falter without the steady infusion of government spending...
...must keep a lid on deficit spending "to demonstrate that they're fiscally responsible," says Gerald Curtis, a Japanese-politics expert and professor at Columbia University. Not everyone is convinced they'll succeed. Masaaki Kanno, chief economist at JPMorgan Securities in Tokyo, is skeptical that cutting wasteful spending will compensate for growing expenditures: Japan's aging population means social-security spending alone must expand by $10.7 billion annually over the next five years. "The DPJ will have to show people a consistent way to finance additional spending," Kanno says. "This has nothing to do with political ideologies...
Even when crisis came, in 2008, it wasn't a crisis of government finances, as some pessimists had feared, but one of mortgages and Wall Street. As Washington battled the troubles, the deficit grew to an estimated $1.6 trillion in the fiscal year that ends this month. That's by far the biggest shortfall ever, in dollar terms. The government will have spent $3.7 trillion and taken in $2.1 trillion. Even by the more forgiving yardstick of percentage of gross domestic product, the shortfall is, at 11.2%, the biggest since World War II. It will be smaller next year...
Well, yes, at some point it does have to start mattering. But one of the great mysteries of modern politics and economics is where exactly that point might be. When the Federal Government runs a deficit, it has to borrow money. It does so by selling Treasury securities, ranging from short-term bills to 30-year bonds, on which it pays interest. This is like you or me borrowing to cover a shortfall or buy a house, with a crucial difference: countries are, in theory at least, immortal. They can keep rolling over their debts indefinitely. The U.S., with...
...plausible explanation for this happy outcome is that Japan was willing to recycle into Treasuries the dollars it earned selling us cars, TVs and stereos. That demand for U.S. debt kept interest rates low. By the early 1990s, though, the national debt - the accumulated product of those years of deficits - approached 50% of GDP, and bond investors abroad and at home seemed to shy away from Treasuries, driving interest rates up. Also, billionaire Ross Perot spent a good part of his fortune making deficits into a political issue. In response, Washington focused for a few years on getting...