For example, the Medicare trustees’ intermediate projections have Medicare spending growing from about 3 percent of GDP today to about  BIS Review 92/2006  1  9 percent in 2050 - a larger share of national output than is currently devoted to Social Security and Medicare together. The fiscal consequences of these trends are large and unavoidable.
The Iraq war was over quickly and its direct economic effects have been expansionary for the US economy in recent months. But all these accumulated worries affected perceptions of the outlook 1 through to mid year. The clearest indication of this was that bond markets pushed down yields to levels not seen in decades.