Excerpt:
Governments “don’t have to pay off their debt like a household does,” said Louise Sheiner, policy director for the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution. “They can just keep rolling it over. They’re never going to go out of business and have to pay all at once.”
Sheiner is co-author, along with Jamie Lenney of the Bank of England, Byron Lutz of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and Brown University’s Finn Schüle, of Sustainability of State and Local Government Pensions: A Public Finance Approach, which was presented at a Brookings conference in March.
State and local liabilities can also be likened to the federal government’s deficit and debt, Sheiner said in an interview with MarketWatch. Most economists think that as long as those numbers stay constant as a share of the economy, it’s not problematic.
Author(s): Andrea Riquier
Publication Date: 2 June 2021
Publication Site: Marketwatch