Edward Lotterman

5 days ago | twincities.com | Edward Lotterman

Bonds are in the news. You may have read that Congress is pushing through a Big Beautiful Bill that will require the U.S. to borrow even more money, via issuing Treasury bonds, to fund the larger and ever-growing U.S. deficit. Japan is struggling with bonds that make up its own large national debt. China, long on the buying side of our bond selling, now threatens to “sell” some. That will force our interest rates up, regardless of what the Federal Reserve does. How exactly does this all work?

1 week ago | twincities.com | Edward Lotterman

Today, the health of the U.S. economy hangs on trade policies, ones not decided by Congress as the U.S. Constitution requires, but rather on the spastic impulses of the ill-informed inhabitant of the Oval Office. In this dire circumstance, ignorance of history tragically plagues public discourse on key issues. Many argue that a globalist ideology brought us to the current state of imports and trade balances.

2 weeks ago | twincities.com | Edward Lotterman

The 119th Congress now deliberating in Washington is rewriting history. Having sat for only 135 days, but already over seven months into fiscal year 2025, it will grab the prize as most fiscally irresponsible Congress ever. The 12th Congress, 1811-1813, held that status for two centuries. It declared war on England in June 1812 and adjourned without appropriating any money with which to fight.

3 weeks ago | twincities.com | Edward Lotterman

Crucial topics in economics go in and out like fashion trends. When I first taught macroecon in the 1980s, the money supply was a key issue in economic policy. Inflation was high. The Keynesian orthodoxy of the 1960s and 1970s, that a central bank like the Federal Reserve should actively raise and lower interest rates to manage the economy, was in disrepute. And the United States was not the only nation that was experiencing recession at the same time as high inflation.

1 month ago | twincities.com | Edward Lotterman

The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis last week released its “advance estimate” of U.S. Gross Domestic Product for the first quarter of 2025. GDP measures the total market value of all final goods and services produced in the country over a period of time and is one of the key indicators of how an economy is performing. Despite acknowledged one-off data anomalies, it showed a very slight decline from the start of the year.