Goldman Warns On U.S. Fiscal Policy: ‘We Are Heading Into Uncharted Territory’

The reviews on Donald Trump’s ill-timed and ill-conceived fiscal stimulus just keep coming in and they are not, as Trump would have it, “tremendous.”

We’ve spent all kinds of time documenting why piling fiscal stimulus atop an overheating economy is a bad idea. We’ve also gone to great lengths to explain why that is especially precarious at a time when the Fed is attempting to run down its balance sheet and when a combination of factors (including, by the way, misguided trade policies) are conspiring to weigh on foreign demand for U.S. debt.

You can read our most recent take on this in “‘Is Nobody Gonna Tell Him?’ MAGA And The Pedal To The Metal Economy“, but suffice to say he risks pulling forward the end of cycle and forcing Jerome Powell to accelerate the hiking cycle which could, in turn, destabilize markets that are depending on a gradualistic pace of monetary policy normalization.

Well, Goldman is out with a new piece called “What’s Wrong With Fiscal Policy?” and again, “the reviews” Trump’s getting are not any semblance of “tremendous”.

“Federal fiscal policy is entering uncharted territory [as] Congress has voted twice in the last two months to substantially expand the budget deficit despite an already elevated debt level and an economy that shows no need for additional fiscal stimulus,” Goldman writes, adding that “while most of the recent fiscal expansion has not come as a surprise to us, this nevertheless raises new questions about the plan for US fiscal policy.”

Right. And see that just underscores what everyone ends up saying about this administration no matter what they’re talking about. It always starts out like this: “It doesn’t come as a complete surprise, but…”

Goldman goes on to note that “US fiscal policy is on an unusual course.” Here’s the projected deficit and debt-to-GDP ratio: