President
Running a country's finances: deciding what the state does, who pays for it, and how much of the bill gets handed to whoever governs in ten years.
What the job actually is
A head of government does not set interest rates — an independent central bank does that, deliberately, so the person facing an election is not the person deciding the price of money. What a president controls is fiscal policy: what the state spends, what it taxes, and what it borrows. That is a thousand public decisions a year rather than one dial, and every one of them has a constituency.
The technical core is smaller than the politics suggests. Debt is not dangerous in itself; it is dangerous relative to the economy that services it and the market's willingness to keep refinancing it. Borrowing to build something that raises output for forty years lowers the debt ratio even as it raises the debt. Borrowing to fund consumption does not. Nothing distinguishes the two on the day you borrow, which is why the discipline has to come from the person choosing rather than from the arithmetic.
What makes the job genuinely hard is the timing mismatch. Fiscal space is created in good years, when creating it is unpopular and unnecessary-looking, and spent in bad ones, when spending it is the only thing standing between a downturn and a depression. A government that spends the good years buying popularity arrives at the recession with no room, a nervous bond market, and an interest bill that is already crowding out the programmes it wanted to protect.
The calls that define it
- What the state does this year — and, separately, who pays for it
- Whether a programme is investment or consumption wearing investment's clothes
- When to take the reform that costs you the street and saves the next decade
- Whether to buy the election, knowing the market prices that the same week
Head of an elected government, constrained by a legislature, a constitutional court, an independent central bank and — most immediately of all — the people who turn up to buy the debt at each auction.
What you'd need to know
The concepts this chair runs on — each one links to a plain-English definition.
Sit in the chair
Reading about a job is the trailer. This simulation makes you do it — free, in the browser, nothing to install and nothing locked.