Share these talks and lectures with your colleagues
Invite colleaguesWe noted you are experiencing viewing problems
-
Check with your IT department that JWPlatform, JWPlayer and Amazon AWS & CloudFront are not being blocked by your network. The relevant domains are *.jwplatform.com, *.jwpsrv.com, *.jwpcdn.com, jwpltx.com, jwpsrv.a.ssl.fastly.net, *.amazonaws.com and *.cloudfront.net. The relevant ports are 80 and 443.
-
Check the following talk links to see which ones work correctly:
Auto Mode
HTTP Progressive Download Send us your results from the above test links at access@hstalks.com and we will contact you with further advice on troubleshooting your viewing problems. -
No luck yet? More tips for troubleshooting viewing issues
-
Contact HST Support access@hstalks.com
-
Please review our troubleshooting guide for tips and advice on resolving your viewing problems.
-
For additional help, please don't hesitate to contact HST support access@hstalks.com
We hope you have enjoyed this limited-length demo
This is a limited length demo talk; you may
login or
review methods of
obtaining more access.
- View the Talks
-
1. Introduction to economics
- Prof. Mariano Torras
-
2. Measuring economic progress: income accounting
- Prof. Mariano Torras
-
3. Measuring economic progress: alternatives
- Prof. Mariano Torras
-
4. Employment and unemployment
- Prof. Mariano Torras
-
5. Inflation
- Prof. Mariano Torras
-
6. Structural change
- Prof. Mariano Torras
-
7. The business cycle
- Prof. Mariano Torras
-
8. What role does the government have in the macroeconomy?
- Prof. Mariano Torras
-
9. Why money matters
- Prof. Mariano Torras
-
10. Debts and deficits
- Prof. Mariano Torras
-
11. Monetary policy
- Prof. Mariano Torras
-
12. The global economy: economic integration
- Prof. Mariano Torras
-
13. The global economy: balance of payments
- Prof. Mariano Torras
Printable Handouts
Navigable Slide Index
- Introduction
- Debts and deficits
- Absolute and relative debt
- Debt-GDP ratios, international comparison
- Debt taxonomy
- Total U.S. indebtedness as percentage of GDP
- A brief history of national debt
- Sovereign debt differs from household debt
- Modern Monetary Theory
- Illustrating crowding out
- Evaluating crowding out
- Interest payments on debt
- Debt and the foreign sector
- The twin deficits
- Output-income-spending flow
- Trade deficits and foreign debt
- Output-income-spending flow: ratios
- U.S. twin deficits as percentage of GDP
- Persistence of budget deficits
- Alternative 1: economic stimulus
- Alternative 2: austerity
- EU deficits and debt levels in 2016
- Budget-economy trade-off
This material is restricted to subscribers.
Topics Covered
- Debt
- Deficit
- GDP
- Modern Monetary Theory
- Crowding out
- Interest
- Twin deficits
- Austerity
Talk Citation
Torras, M. (2021, August 29). Debts and deficits [Video file]. In The Business & Management Collection, Henry Stewart Talks. Retrieved August 31, 2024, from https://doi.org/10.69645/VJQO7988.Export Citation (RIS)
Publication History
Transcript
Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
0:00
Hi, my name is Mariano Torras,
I'm Professor of Economics at Adelphi University in New York.
We are going to be doing a lecture series on macroeconomics.
0:13
In the preceding lecture, we learned that if a government spends
more money than it raises from taxes, it incurs a deficit.
When it does so, the only way to finance the deficit is to borrow money.
All national governments borrow money by issuing bonds of varying durations.
The total of all the government bonds outstanding is the same thing as the nation's debt.
A national debt is always a concern, since it
requires the government to pay interest to its bondholders.
As we saw earlier, the interest is a transfer payment that reduces
the ability of the government to conduct its other functions,
1:00
but the importance of the size of the national debt is also sometimes overstated.
We should always pay more attention to the debt as a percentage of GDP,
rather than the absolute size of the debt, since the debt-to-GDP ratio gives
us a sense of the ability of the country to service its debt.
For example, the national debt of the United States is in the neighborhood of
$25 trillion, which sounds like quite a lot of money.
It is, of course, but its GDP is not much less, about $20 trillion.
Japan in contrast, has a slightly smaller debt than the United States, but far less than half its GDP.
This means that its debt/GDP ratio,