How To Stop The Fiscal Emergency Facing U.S. Cities And States
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 13 April 2020
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
With the U.S. economy going into a deep slump, the Federal government has attempted to counteract the pain by increasing spending. But for cities and states, it’s virtually impossible for them to run counter-cyclical fiscal policy. Furthermore, the crisis is draining local coffers due to public health expenditure and the collapse of tax revenue. This has already led to the start of a state and local austerity wave (spending cuts, layoffs, etc.) that could take years to reverse. On this week’s episode, we speak with three people who have been writing about this aspect of the crisis, and how it could be addressed by both the Fed and the U.S. Treasury. We’re joined by Skanda Amarnath of Employ America, Yakov Feygin of the Berggruen Institute, and Alex Williams, a grad student at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, to discuss the shape of the problem and the way back to economic health.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Join us in New York on November 29th for the Bloomberg Canadian Finance Conference, |
| 0:04.6 | proudly sponsored by National Bank of Canada Financial Markets. |
| 0:07.8 | 2023 marks the 11 year anniversary of our Canada focused event and continues the tradition of providing timely |
| 0:13.8 | insights and actionable strategies. We'll have senior government |
| 0:17.1 | officials from Saskatchewan, Quebec, British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario as well |
| 0:21.9 | as speakers from Northland Power, World Bank, Transolta, and many more. |
| 0:26.0 | Register at Bloomberg Live.com slash Canadian Finance slash radio. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast I'm Tracy Allaway. Hello. I'm Joe Wiesenthal. |
| 0:46.0 | And I'm Tracy Allaway. |
| 0:48.0 | Tracy, do you remember you said on a recent episode something akin to we finally covered all of the different |
| 0:56.4 | aspects of this crisis. I knew you were jotting that down in your memory and it was going to come back to haunt me. |
| 1:04.2 | I stand by it. |
| 1:05.2 | I think we've hit the really big ones, but I know you're going to pull another one out of your |
| 1:10.6 | pocket right now. |
| 1:11.6 | I think I have like 20 more to pull out. No, come on. I said the major |
| 1:17.8 | strains in the financial system. I caviated it. You can't say that there are 40 major financial strains |
| 1:25.9 | But you're going to I think I can tell I think they're white I think they're right literally be 40 more major ones but nonetheless we definitely have not hit all the major ones and so I think that today's |
| 1:37.2 | episode will be one that I think sort of unquestionably counts as major even if you know the number of remaining ones are still |
| 1:46.4 | TBD. All right fair enough and I think I know which one it is it has to be the |
| 1:52.1 | muni market, right? |
| 1:53.7 | Yeah, so absolutely. |
| 1:54.8 | So, due to the nature of the crisis that we're seeing, |
| 1:59.8 | we have a situation in which a lot of the costs, particularly on the public health side, are |
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