Nervous financial markets and waves of fiscal austerity spreading across Europe raise an important question: when does a country’s budget deficit become a problem?

The easy answer, of course, is that a deficit is too large when it can no longer be financed. But by that time it’s too late, so it’s important to ask if there is a good way to tell before things get that bad.

Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, in a recent paper called Growth in a Time of Debt, found that when government debt reaches 90 percent of GDP, economic growth is seriously retarded.

But rules of thumb are by their nature imperfect, and it’s difficult to apply the 90 percent formula across the board. The U.S., for example, is not Greece—it’s closer to being the anti-Greece, in fact. Greece is a tiny, uncompetitive country that does not control its own currency. The business climate there is terrible. America is a vast, competitive, adaptable nation that not only controls its own monetary policy, but is blessed with the world’s reserve currency. The climate for business is favorable, abetted by large reserves of cultural and intellectual capital.

So we shouldn’t conclude that just because the Europeans are suddenly cutting public spending, we ought to as well. Since deflation looks more threatening than inflation, it seems sensible, for now at least, for America to borrow and spend. Washington’s cost of money is close to zero, and the multiplier effect (for which this blog is named) means that pumping funds into the economy is likely to pay growth dividends, especially if the money is directed at those likeliest to spend it.

Countries almost always run deficits and, despite the ardent wishes of fiscal conservatives, they probably always will. The problem, when debt accumulates, is that it can make you vulnerable to investors who may become impatient or even irrational. If these are the people who have the money you need to finance your deficit not in your own currency, you may find yourself in the position of several Eurozone countries now, who are forced to embrace austerity at the worst possible time. Perhaps the lesson is not to run up large deficits in good times, as Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland, so that in bad times you can get credit when you need it.

The Germans too are embarking on a fiscal austerity program, and consumers aren’t spending there either.

David Cameron, the new PM, warns that the nation’s fiscal hole is even deeper than it seemed, and that savage spending cuts will be required. An important union leader calls Cameron’s speech “a chilling attack on the public sector, public sector workers, the poor, the sick and the vulnerable.”

The full (and sobering) story is here.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its May employment situation report today and the news was mostly grim. Sure, unemployment dropped to 9.7 percent from 9.9 percent. But don’t get too excited, because almost all the new jobs created in May were for census-takers, and these folks will be unemployed again soon.

In more bad news masquerading as good, the so-called mancession appears to be easing. Most developed countries are beset by one of these male recessions, with men suffering the brunt of job losses due to their much greater representation in construction and manufacturing—both of which are hard-hit almost everywhere. In this country, at least, the mancession looks like it’s easing—until you look a little closer and realize that this is only the case because men leaving the labor force increased by 4.7 percent over last year, an increase twice that of women. In other words, men aren’t gaining jobs. They’re giving up.

What shall we do with the horrendous number of idle men? Their skills may not be valued in industries that have done better than traditional men-industries. Training for new kinds of work is one possibility, but demand for new workers may not be there yet; relocation to other states may be out of the question if your mortgage is underwater; and the Euro crisis is a pinch of salt on the slow-healing wound of recession.

For a great many men, this Father’s Day is unlikely to be a happy one.

The world has its usual cornucopia of troubles, but if you were worried about federal deficits, you can at least set those aside and focus on unemployment, oil spills and other here-and-now concerns. That’s the message of Levy Senior Scholar James K. Galbraith in this lively interview with Ezra Klein. Galbraith offers this historical perspective:

Since the 1790s, how often has the federal government not run a deficit? Six short periods, all leading to recession. Why? Because the government needs to run a deficit, it’s the only way to inject financial resources into the economy. If you’re not running a deficit, it’s draining the pockets of the private sector.

From today’s NY Times:

The cost of public pensions has been systemically underestimated nationwide for more than two decades, say some analysts. By these estimates, state and local officials have promised $5 trillion worth of benefits while thinking they were committing taxpayers to roughly half that amount.

As Dimitri Papadimitriou said on this blog recently, we are facing a multidimensional pension crisis in this country. A coherent national retirement system–truly comprehensive Social Security obviating private pensions–might have avoided these runaway state and local pension obligations, which may yet end up on the federal balance sheet.

The International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth has issued a report on an unintended consequence of women-empowering microfinance: an increase in child labor. The report underscores the importance of unpaid work–work performed mostly by women. A development program, small or big, should consider the constraint that unpaid care duties impose on women, and provide assistance through a social care system. As a saying goes, “It takes a village to raise a child.”

An earlier Levy post outlined America’s multi-dimensional pension crisis. Now comes this paper from economist Joshua Rauh, who says that at least seven states may be unable to pay their public-pension obligations during the next decade–and by 2030 that number could reach 31 states.

Barring reforms, Rauh says, a federal bailout could be needed, possibly exceeding $1 trillion. In the paper, he gives a sense of the magnitude of the problem: “The gap between assets and already-promised liabilities in state pension funds alone was over $3 trillion at the end of 2008.”

What is to be done? Part of the answer, Rauh writes, is that states might give public employees defined contribution plans–and bring into the Social Security system the quarter of state and local workers now outside of it.

Getting medical insurance out of the workplace would have been a grand idea. But bowing to practicality, the Obama administration pushed through a good-enough plan that leaves it there.

Let’s not make the same mistake twice when it comes to pensions. America and its retirees are facing a multi-dimensional pension crisis—one that, even more than health-care, requires severing the connection between the workplace and the social safety net.

Like health insurance, employer-provided pensions are regarded as the natural course of things in this country, but it wasn’t always so. It all started during World War II, when the government clamped down on wages. Benefits were a way of getting around the restrictions to increase compensation, but they persisted for good reasons. Paying workers with benefits rather than cash had tax advantages, and promising something 30 years into the future is always more appealing to employers than paying higher wages today.

But the system has bred serious problems, all of them getting larger by the day. First, individuals and their employers are terrible retirement planners. Companies have every incentive to make rosy assumptions that let them under-fund their plans, while employees, increasingly left to their own devices with 401(k)s and other such self-funded plans, probably don’t save enough.

Then there’s the problem of investing. Neither employers nor employees are very good at managing the money they do save. As Yeva Nersisyan and Levy Senior Scholar L. Randall Wray have shown, from 2007 to 2008, private pensions and IRAs lost roughly $2.9 trillion that people were counting on for their old age.

Defined-benefit plans—the nice, old-fashioned kind funded by employers—may have made sense when workers stayed put for years. Nowadays, though, people change jobs a lot more often and through no fault of their own. Employees fall victim to technology or downsizing every day. Yet vesting requirements persist, which means that these days more and more of your work-life won’t get you much pension credit. continue reading…

Dean Baker debunks the myth that sluggish growth is caused by banks not lending money to small businesses. Long story short: it’s the recession! Businesses (especially small ones) are looking less like good credit risks because they have less revenue. What bank would be lending more in this atmosphere? A foolish bank.