Cheap debt has a way of teaching the wrong lessons. It whispers that rollover is normal, that maturity can always be pushed forward, that interest costs are manageable, that markets …
A city budget is where political poetry goes to die. Grand promises about inclusion, safety, mobility, parks, housing, culture, sanitation, and opportunity eventually end up in a document filled with …
Climate policy used to sound like an argument about science, conscience, and distant time. It now sounds like procurement, subsidies, industrial strategy, grid upgrades, heat pumps, battery plants, flood defenses, …
Every rich democracy has a locked room filled with beautiful promises. Pensions will be there. Health coverage will hold. Retirement will feel earned, not improvised. Old age will not become …
The tax bill rarely arrives like thunder. It arrives like a polite envelope, a payroll deduction, a property assessment, a sales receipt, a fuel charge, a school levy, a fee …
A true spending review does not feel like strategy at first. It feels like a bright light switched on in a room where everyone had learned to live with the …
Few fiscal rituals are as theatrical and as economically absurd as the debt ceiling. It arrives with the mood of a final showdown, stern speeches, countdown graphics, market nerves, patriotic …
Modern tax systems are haunted by movement. Capital moves. Profits move. Firms move paper faster than goods. Wealth changes costume. Labor becomes more mobile in some places and more informal …
Oil has a way of humiliating budget plans. It turns elegant forecasts into damp paper and makes confident ministers sound like men reading vows during an earthquake. One month the …
Fiscal rules are the kind of institution people praise in peacetime and resent in storms. They sound tidy on paper, debt anchors, deficit ceilings, expenditure paths, escape clauses. They promise …