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Krugman on a possible double-dip recession
Monday, December 28, 2009
On ABC's This Week yesterday, Economist Paul Krugman noted there is a "reasonably high chance" that the economy will contract again late next year and, of course, more stimulus would go a long way in either preventing that from happening or minimizing its impact.
It's reasonable to think that, when placing odds on something bad happening, an economist who says there's a good chance of it occurring but who then quickly follows it up with the qualifier "less than 50-50 odds" is virtually certain of the bad thing happening.
5 comments:
Seems like you don't cotton to PK, but I do.
I think he called a lot of things very accurately on the run up to the giant cluster f%*k of last year.
For a short list:
- yelled "Housing Bubble" many times for many years.
- called the lie on Bush's no_math accounting when he rammed through his tax cuts and huge deficit budgets.
- called the lie on MWD justified Iraq invasion.
This is by no means complete, but you can count on PK to call them as he sees them and he proves to be right much of the time.
You lose credibility when you refer to the WMD "Lie." No one lied. The intelligence might have been faulty and the judgment questionable, but there was no lie.
As for the housing bubble, there were plenty of people shouting about it, but there were quite a few people in Congress who weren't listening or take the political heat for doing something about it. Barney Frank and Chris Dodd come to mind very quickly. The Fed and even regulatory agencies deserve some of the blame.
Krugman does come up with some insightful analysis. The trouble is that it is often difficult to separate it from the partisan sniping he has engaged in over the years.
Krugman is certainly not my favorite economist, but there are much worse ones out there (and much more dangerous ones). Probably my biggest beef with him is that everything is a partisan issue. Most people probably don't know if Bernanke is a Democrat or a Republican, but everyone knows Krugman's political affiliation.
Wasn't half the blogosphere shouting "housing bubble" for many years?
Yeah, Krugman is too politically biased for me too. He should just be assessing circumstances from an economics perspective and not inserting his own morality/ethical judgements. In the medical industry, I believe this would be called 'bedside manner".
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