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Federal debt rollovers as a Ponzi scheme?

by W. Curtiss Priest

02 April 2002 22:58 UTC


Abstracts & Citations of Recently Published Papers:

Blanchard, Olivier and Weil, Philippe (2001) "Dynamic Efficiency, the 
Riskless Rate, and Debt Ponzi Games under Uncertainty", Advances in 
Macroeconomics: Vol. 1: No. 2, Article 3.
http://www.bepress.com/bejm/advances/vol1/iss2/art3

ABSTRACT:
In a dynamically efficient economy, can a government roll its debt 
forever and avoid the need to raise taxes? In a series of examples of 
economies with zero growth, this paper shows that such Ponzi games 
may be infeasible even when the average rate of return on bonds is 
negative, and may be feasible even when the average rate of return on 
bonds is positive.  The paper then reveals the structure which 
underlies these examples.
-- 


           W. Curtiss Priest, Director, CITS
      Center for Information, Technology & Society
         466 Pleasant St., Melrose, MA  02176
         Voice: 781-662-4044  BMSLIB@MIT.EDU
      Fax: 781-662-6882 WWW: http://Cybertrails.org


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