Felix Salmon — How Pete Peterson is driving the fiscal consensus

The obsession about fiscal prudence is a new phenomenon, and can be dated, pretty much, to 2008, when Blackstone went public and Pete Peterson took his billion dollars in proceeds and decided to use it to found the Peter G Peterson Foundation. Wherever fiscal prudence is preached, Peterson’s money can nearly always be found.

That's only in the US. The EZ has its own champions of fiscal responsibility and austerity — the bankers.

Read it at Reuters | Opinion
How Pete Peterson is driving the fiscal consensus
by Felix Salmon

Favorite line: I’m decidedly dubious about the wisdom of teaching sovereign fiscal responsibility to high schoolers. For one thing, it’s inevitable that many teachers will resort to the personal-finance metaphor, and thereby teach something which is downright wrong.

Salmon gets it that the government is like a big household analogy is false, but it doesn't see that it is because the government is the currency issuer, hence unconstrained operationally, while households and firms are currency users, hence revenue constrained.