Australia’s current account deficit is back. Should we care?

Australia is a current-account deficit country again. Thirty years ago that sentence would have led the evening news. Today it barely rates a mention.

The silence has a history. In the 1990s an ANU economist, John Pitchford, won an argument that the current-account deficit was not a policy problem. His view became the official view. This post recaps that argument, and then asks whether it still offers comfort. I think it does not, and on Pitchford’s own terms.

The Fragile Equilibrium

Each month I have been reflecting on the war in Iran. In August I described the Iran war as a morass. It still is. But something important has changed.

America appears to have found a way to live in it.