Fiscal Monetary News Today

Lucrezia Reichlin, Adair Turner, Michael Woodford The COVID-19 pandemic forces swept away some of the conventional taboos in economic thinking, such as the radical idea of helicopter money (Benigno and Nisticò 2020, Cukierman 2020, Galì 2020, Yashiv 2020, Kapoor and Buiter 2020, Velasco et al. 2020). The term uses the fanciful imagery that was originally invented by Milton Friedman (1968). Since the end of the 1990s, Friedman’s idea has received more attention in academia and policy circles...

State and local governments set the budgets for local police and fire departments, public schools, health departments, road constructions and repair, public transportation and many other essential public services. How each state, city or town gets revenue varies widely, though it ultimately is some combination of income, sales and property taxes. No matter what the combination, when the economy is hurting – people are unemployed and are buying less and businesses are closing – state and loc...