The appropriate timing of fiscal retrenchment is, in fact, difficult to decide.

Fiscal retrenchment amid weak private demand would lead to chronically high unemployment.

True, fiscal retrenchment in Germany is more cautious than official rhetoric suggests.

Retrenchment is not isolationism it is an adjustment of strategic goals and means.

And George W. Bush s misguided invasion of Iraq created the current mood of retrenchment.

To dampen the additional inflationary pressures implied by a weaker rupee, more aggressive fiscal retrenchment is needed.

Immediate debt restructuring on a grand scale, biting the bullet and accepting a few painful years of retrenchment.

Although fiscal policy was not the only cause of the double dip, ill timed retrenchment certainly contributed to it.

Of course, after several years of unfettered credit expansion, some retrenchment was necessary and desirable, and Tigar probably overextended itself.

WASHINGTON, DC Many observers have cited the crisis in Ukraine as yet another example of American retrenchment and declining global influence.

After a period of massive expansion during which the financial services sector nearly doubled in size, some retrenchment is natural and normal.

A retrenchment of public consumption actually subtracted more demand in the US (0.8 percentage points) than in the European Union (0.1 points).

A shadow or actual International Monetary Fund program would vastly enhance the credibility of a policy of fiscal retrenchment and structural reforms.

Given synchronized fiscal retrenchment in most advanced economies, another year of mediocre growth could give way to outright contraction in some countries.

Hence, funding for public health has been a tough sell in good economic times, and is one of the first targets for retrenchment.

Some say the bar to a good economy is the Continent's inflated welfare state and the solution is retrenchment, beginning with raising retirement ages.

Presidents who followed policies of retrenchment since the end of World War II have included Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and now Obama.

The sharp fiscal retrenchment that has now started throughout southern Europe should contribute further to a sharp deceleration, if not outright fall, in domestic demand there.

Historians can make a credible case that periods of maximalist over commitment have done more damage to America s place in the world than periods of retrenchment.

Having overstretched its forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, and facing economic retrenchment at home, the US is withdrawing, and there is no other power to take its place.

If repeated, this pattern may erode confidence in financial markets and regulators, which could well lead to heavy handed regulation, the expansion of the state, and retrenchment from globalization.

Still others interpreted compassionate conservatism, as the commentator Andrew Sullivan put it, as a smokescreen...necessary for any vaguely successful retrenchment of government power in an insatiable entitlement state.

It is more accurate to see the current mood as a swing of the US foreign policy pendulum between what Columbia University s Stephen Sestanovich has called maximalist policies and retrenchment policies.

PARIS The dispute that has emerged in the United States and Europe between proponents of further government stimulus and advocates of fiscal retrenchment feels very much like a debate about economic history.

Most would suggest that a period of financial retrenchment and slow GDP growth poses a serious threat to the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which is based on economic performance.

In fact, many other rapidly growing emerging economies have suffered and worse than China from the drop in global demand resulting from ongoing retrenchment in high income economies since the 2008 financial crisis.

True, fiscal retrenchment in Germany is more cautious than official rhetoric suggests. But, overall, the eurozone and Great Britain have clearly shifted towards austerity, which the US is still very reluctant to consider.

An Israel and Palestine that could resolve their differences and live side by side as democracies would become an island of stability and sanity in a sea of political disorder and economic retrenchment.

If so, it may not necessarily end with a repeat of the slaughters of the last century, but with an economic retrenchment that brings economic stagnation and consigns billions of people to grinding poverty.

The pro stimulus camp often refers to the damage wrought by fiscal retrenchment in the US in 1937, four years after Franklin Roosevelt s election as US president and the launch of the New Deal.

Without a clear and convincing doctrine, at least some Asian leaders are likely to remain dubious of America s ability to remain Asia s dominant military force, particularly given its economic woes, projected fiscal retrenchment, and other overseas commitments.

They would help to ensure that, even in an era of retrenchment in American foreign policy, the world would continue to enjoy the most important benefits of the expansive foreign policy that the US can no longer afford.

BRUSSELS The G 20 meetings this month, first in Busan, South Korea for finance ministers, and later this month in Toronto for heads of government, mark the moment when the major players in the world economy shift gear from budgetary stimulus to retrenchment.

Indeed, austerity is spreading to the core of the eurozone, the United States, and other advanced economies (with the exception of Japan). Given synchronized fiscal retrenchment in most advanced economies, another year of mediocre growth could give way to outright contraction in some countries.

Still others interpreted compassionate conservatism, as the commentator Andrew Sullivan put it, as a smokescreen...necessary for any vaguely successful retrenchment of government power in an insatiable entitlement state. They expected tax cuts to be followed by a fangs bared attack on social welfare spending once deficits reemerged.

In the past, some countries have enjoyed tearless consolidation, because the launch of a retrenchment program was accompanied by a drop in long term interest rates, a decline in private savings, or a surge in exports thanks to exchange rate depreciation (or all of these at the same time).

Whereas the Israeli Palestinian conflict has long been an island of violence and turmoil in a relatively stable (if oppressed) region, now the tables are turned. An Israel and Palestine that could resolve their differences and live side by side as democracies would become an island of stability and sanity in a sea of political disorder and economic retrenchment.