It blames the cause of its deficit on cuts from central government, the cost of the merger and on a delay in money owed from the sale of land.

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Obama also acknowledged that while Social Security is not the cause of the deficit, it needed long term reforms that would have to be tackled separately.

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An IMF study in 2009, by Marco Terrones and Thomas Helbling, concluded that the biggest cause of the switch from a global current-account deficit to a surplus was mismeasurement of services.

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He started buying foreign currencies for the first time in 2002, with the idea that a growing trade deficit and other economic policies coming out of Washington would cause the dollar to fall.

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That risks aggravating the deep Europe-wide recession threatening next year, which could prompt a downgrade of the entire zone's credit ratings and cause economies to miss their deficit targets triggering still more austerity.

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To the extent that employers respond to the employer mandate by reducing hiring, or even laying off existing workers, that will cause a loss of income tax and payroll tax revenues, further adding to the deficit.

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However, the news that there is to be a significant acceleration of the efforts to reduce the U.K. budget deficit will cause pain.

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But serving then as Argentina's top finance official, he presided over a ballooning budget deficit which turned Argentina into the biggest borrower among the emerging markets, the cause of the current crisis.

BBC: Daniel Marx with Domingo Cavallo

Perhaps the most important cause of our economic malaise is that for years as a nation we have been living beyond our means, in deficit with the rest of the world, buying from other countries far more than we produce, till our indebtedness became unsustainable.

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