Here’s A Calendar For Fiscal Cliff-Mageddon

By admin on June 15, 2012

All of this noise out of Greece has taken attention away from the fastly approaching U.S. fiscal cliff: the end-of-year deadline that threatens to lop off an estimated 3 to 5 percentage points off of GDP growth in 2013.

Earlier today, Morgan Stanley’s Vincent Reinhart slashed his GDP growth forecasts for 2012 and 2013 blaming both deterioration in Europe and uncertainty tied to the fiscal cliff.

Reinhart’s note discusses the timetable regarding the fiscal cliff:

Unfortunately, there is no clear timetable for action. Congress will deal with the situation when it is good and ready to do so. And, the lessons from similar experiences in recent years suggests that such action will occur at the last minute.

But as an economist who’s getting paid to make forecasts and opinions, he shares with us the key dates that he’ll be watching. Here’s his assesment:

[T]here is a strong likelihood that there will be a lame duck session of Congress following the November election. Ideally, legislators will reach agreement on a plan which avoids the 2013 fiscal cliff and, at the same time, addresses the unsustainable longer-term course of US fiscal policy. However, given the elevated degree of gridlock in DC and the likelihood that some degree of gridlock will remain no matter what the election outcome (it is mathematically impossible for either party to achieve a filibuster proof majority in the Senate), this is an awful lot to expect during a post-election session of Congress that may last six weeks or so at most. A more likely scenario might involve a short-term extension of the major budget provisions or delayed action until debt ceiling constraints help to force a compromise agreement in early 2013. Of course, the longer the delay, the greater the likelihood that policy uncertainty will negatively impact the real economy.