Blog

State and local governments face a total deficit of about $131 billion for 2009 and $181 billion for 2010, the Government Accountability Office . Honestly, this estimate seems low. But, low or not, it may be as good as it gets. The GAO notes that Read More

NYU prof Thomas Philippon and U-VA Prof Ariell Reshef have written a tracing the trajectory of wages in the American financial sector over the last century. Not surprisingly, financial-industry wages broke away from the rest of the economy starting i Read More

The best fiscal news for New York in ages is that three and a half years ago, the city lost its bid to host the 2012 Olympics. This week, the UK, which won the bid, , because the private partners couldn't find financing for the "Olympic Village" a Read More

For New York, it's not paying (anymore) to be home to the smartest guys in the room. Since its credit-bubble peak, the securities industry has cut 3.1 percent of its jobs nationwide, according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Assoc Read More

Today's New York Times "a growing sense" in Albany that the Democrats who now control state government will seek to raise state income taxes on "the wealthiest New Yorkers" to help close a $15 billion budget gap.  The Times articl Read More

Congratulations to President Obama! One of the new president's first tasks will be figuring out how to get Congress to fix the stimulus bill that the House proposed last week. In its current form, the bill won't do much for road and rail infras Read More

Australia's Macquarie, along with Spain's Cintra, was the global pioneer of large-scale private-public partnerships (PPPs) in transportation infrastructure. American states and Read More

Data point #1. Metropolitan Transportation Authority executive director Elliot Sander and the authority's board members attracted more than 600 people to their marathon six-and-a-half-hour fare-hike and service-cut hearing in Manh Read More

In a  interview in yesterday's Journal, David Swensen, the longtime chief investment officer for Yale's endowment, had an implicit warning for public pension funds and other supposedly "sophisticated" investors (ha ha) whose overseers thi Read More

Congressman Anthony Weiner, a probable mayoral candidate, showed yesterday that if he does run, he's going to campaign against Mayor Bloomberg's fiscal record over the past eight years -- and boy, does Weiner have a lot of material. Most startlin Read More

In recent months, states and cities have lobbied for their piece of the bailout pie. Among other requests, they've asked the federal government to support municipal bond markets by directly buying municipal bonds through the new programs that the Tr Read More

If the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is right, Governor David Paterson's economic and fiscal projections for New York State are not gloomy enough.  The CBO expects higher unemployment and a somewhat slower recovery than Paterson's budget has pro Read More