Robert Kuttner

In the late 1920s, the French minister of war was one Andre Maginot, a World War I veteran with a handlebar mustache and a limp. M. Maginot, learning the lessons of the last war, had the idea that if France could just build an impregnable fortification on its eastern frontiers, Germany could never again invade […]

The stakes of our leaders’ surreal obsession with deficits just got a lot higher. The economy could tip from stagnation into a real depression. As it dawned on Wall Street that austerity would not in fact help the real economy, panic selling ensued. The swooning stock market, in turn, creates one more source of belt-tightening […]

In the financial crisis, the signature of the credit-rating companies has been that they are a day late and a dollar short. In this case, $2 trillion. S&P made a $2 trillion error in the computations that were the basis of its rationale for downgrading Treasury securities. But that was petty cash compared to what […]

Let’s take a moment to recall the logic of the deficit hysteria and the related deal just signed by President Obama. The economy, supposedly, was mired in stagnation because of a lack of “confidence.” That confidence gap, in turn, reflected anxiety about the escalating deficits and national debt. Deal with the debt, and businesses would […]

A number of commentators have asked: Why did the president categorically reject recourse to the 14th Amendment to raise the debt ceiling, even as a bargaining chit, when that rejection forced Democrats to accept a deal mostly on Republican terms? The New York Times‘ Joe Nocera writes: My own view is that Obama should have […]

While Congress completes action on the deal to raise the debt ceiling in exchange for deep spending cuts, the economy is on the brink of a deeper recession. And by the time phase two of the deal approaches, between Thanksgiving and Christmas (whose great idea was that?), members of both parties could be singing a […]

The deal negotiated last night is a disaster politically and economically. The liberals who went all out to elect Barack Obama have been reacting with increasing dismay to the president’s combination of center-right impulses and inept negotiating habits. The right plays hardball, is rewarded for its intransigence, creating incentives to play more hardball. Its success […]

In a just world, Speaker John Boehner’s failure to get the votes for a Republican debt-ceiling plan that is already doomed to certain Senate defeat should put pressure on Republicans to compromise. But that doesn’t seem likely. Boehner may yet find the votes for an even more conservative (and doomed) measure, and in any case, […]

Uh-oh. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who has previously functioned pretty well as a firebreak against President Obama’s instincts to give away the store, now seems to be tottering toward a Republican deal. If that occurs, yet another leader would be rewarding Republican intransigence. Reportedly, Reid’s deal, offered as the Democrats’ last hope to ward […]