Sir, Lawrence Summers is certainly correct in asserting that the right focus of the European countries must be on restoring economic growth if they are to restore fiscal sustainability (“Growth not austerity is the best...

In reminding us how very different the present global economic cycle is from previous postwar economic cycles, Martin Wolf makes a number of fine points. However, the one salient point that he does not emphasise is how very compromised are the public finances in many major industrialised economies including the US, the UK, Japan, Italy and Spain.

Europe's debt crisis has the very real potential not only to inflict a severe blow to the European economy but also to derail the fragile US economic recovery.

At this event, Charles Blahous will be joined by AEI's Andrew G. Biggs to dissect the competing positions in the current social security debate and offer solutions to resolve their differences.

Europe's economy looks like it will continue to get worse, before it gets better.

The last thing countries like Spain, Ireland, Greece, Italy, and Portugal need is a strong currency at a time when they are trying to redress their highly compromised public finances in the midst of severe economic recessions.

Krishna Guha's article paints too pessimistic a long-term outlook for the U.S. dollar by not focusing on the basic fact that, for there to be a major further U.S. dollar depreciation, the dollar would need to depreciate substantially against the euro and the yen.

The United States' budget deficit has placed its public finances on a clearly unsustainable path, even before considering the serious public finance problems at the state level. US public debt levels as a percent of GDP are on a path to reach within a year or two those levels at which a funding crisis in Europe's periphery was triggered.