Just how far do you have to go to come up with 'reasons' to love-your-debt? :
And let us give credit where credit is due. The Bush administration’s decision to borrow massively, over a period where global long-term interest rates fell massively, was not a bad market call. -Ken Rogoff, writing in the FTThis might make a shred of sense if the U.S. were ever going to pay off any of its borrowings, rather than just refinance them at the prevailing rates.
I think it smacks of arrogance to think that the U.S. is always going to have willing lenders at its doors. Niall Ferguson makes a persuasive case for U.S. decline, for one. It's not necessarily decay, it's just that others will have a proportionately larger place at the table.
Under such circumstances and the vast uncertainties over time-periods ranging twenty to seventy years down the road, a declining debt-to-GDP ratio is prudent and advisable, not even a stable one (i.e. declining / less financial risk).
Martin Wolf is always a good read, but how it is that he ignores the current fiscal failure to fund future liabilities as a trend that is "not serious", but warns that folks ought to shift consideration to "long-run commitments" instead is baffling.
