Krugman

Vintage Krugman: Stating the Obvious

Mon, 20 May 2013 07:24:00 GMT

Source: economistsview.typepad.com --- Monday, May 20, 2013
Don't say you weren't warned. This is Paul Krugman, just a few days under 10 years ago: Stating the Obvious, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times, May 27, 2003 : "The lunatics are now in charge of the asylum." So wrote the normally staid Financial Times, traditionally the voice of solid British business opinion, when surveying last week's tax bill. Indeed, the legislation is doubly absurd: the gimmicks used to make an $800-billion-plus tax cut carry an official price tag of only $320 billion are a joke, yet the cost without the gimmicks is so large that the nation can't possibly afford it while keeping its other promises. But then maybe that's the point. The Financial Times suggests that "more extreme Republicans" actually want a fiscal train wreck: "Proposing to slash federal spending, particularly on social programs, is a tricky electoral proposition, but a fiscal crisis offers the tantalizing prospect of forcing such cuts through the back door." Good for The Financial Times. It seems that stating the obvious has now, finally, become respectable. It's no secret that right-wing ideologues want to abolish programs Americans take for granted. But not long ago, to suggest that the Bush administration's policies might actually be driven by those ideologues — that the administration was deliberately setting the country up for a fiscal crisis in which popular social programs could be sharply cut — was to be accused of spouting conspi ...

Paul Krugman’s right: Austerity kills

Sun, 19 May 2013 18:45:00 GMT

Source: www.salon.com --- Sunday, May 19, 2013
“I will never forgive them,” wrote 13-year-old Kieran McArdle to the Daily Record, a national newspaper based in Glasgow. “I won’t be able to come to terms with my dad’s death until I get justice for him.” Kieran’s father, 57-year-old Brian, had worked as a security guard in Lanarkshire, near Glasgow. The day after Christmas 2011, Brian had a stroke, which left him paralyzed on his left side, blind in one eye, and unable to speak. He could no longer continue working to support his family, so he signed up for disability income from the British government. That government, in the hands of Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron since the 2010 elections, would prove no friend to the McArdles. Cameron claimed that hundreds of thousands of Britons were cheating the government’s disability system. The Department for Work and Pensions begged to differ. It estimated that less than 1 percent of disability benefit funds went to people who were not genuinely disabled. Still, Cameron proceeded to cut billions of pounds from welfare benefits including support for the disabled. To try to meet Cameron’s targets, the Department for Work and Pensions hired Atos, a private French “systems integration” firm. Atos billed the government £400 million to carry out medical evaluations of people receiving disability benefits. Continue Reading... ...

Krugman: Austerity Policies Based On 'A Mythical 70s That Never Was'

Sun, 19 May 2013 17:53:16 GMT

Source: www.huffingtonpost.com --- Sunday, May 19, 2013
They say hindsight is 20/20, but according to Paul Krugman it may actually be much worse than that when it comes to economic policy-making. The Nobel-Prize winning economist and New York Times columnist wrote in a blog post Sunday that current policymakers are basing their decisions to cut spending, leading in many cases to high unemployment, on the false notion that the recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s was caused by too much government debt and too many government handouts. During the period leading up to that recession government debt was low and stable or falling as a share of the economy. What actually caused the recession of the late 1970s, Krugman writes , was an unfortunate vicious cycle of workers demanding more money because they expected prices to rise, companies raising prices to pay for their increased costs as well as big oil price shocks. “It would be bad enough if we were basing policy today on lessons from the 70s,” Krugman wrote in the blog post Sunday . “It’s even worse that we’re basing policy today on a mythical 70s that never was.” Though Krugman has been criticizing some policymakers’ obsession with austerity for years, the strategy has recently come under fire after a widely-cited paper by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff thought to prove that high levels of government debt correlated with economic downturns, turned out to be riddled with errors . For their part, Reinhart and Rog ...

Your assigned reading for today: Paul Krugman in the New York Review of Books

Sun, 19 May 2013 17:45:50 GMT

Source: www.washingtonmonthly.com --- Sunday, May 19, 2013
Readers, my next couple of posts will be delayed. I was just working on a long one which, sadly, got eaten when my computer suddenly shut down. Normally when that happens the post is saved and can be retrieved, but that didn't occur this time. In the meantime, please read Paul Krugman's superb piece on austerity economics in the current New York Review of Books, and talk amongst yourselves! ...

Brad DeLong : Paul Krugman: One of Michael Kinsley's Problem Is That He Is Not Living in the Real 1970s

Sun, 19 May 2013 14:33:41 GMT

Source: pinboard.in --- Sunday, May 19, 2013
Paul Krugman: One of Michael Kinsley's Problem Is That He Is Not Living in the Real 1970s ...

MICKEY KAUS: When will Krugman endorse the Gang of 8 amnesty?…

Sun, 19 May 2013 12:40:00 GMT

Source: pjmedia.com --- Sunday, May 19, 2013
MICKEY KAUS: When will Krugman endorse the Gang of 8 amnesty? ...

The state of economics: Krugman is wrong

Sat, 18 May 2013 17:45:18 GMT

Source: rwer.wordpress.com --- Saturday, May 18, 2013
from Peter Radford Paul Krugman this morning hammers away at hedge fund managers who, by and large, are complaining about Fed monetary policy, and especially its so-called quantitative easing. The managers are all predicting doom and hyperinflation because of the ongoing ease of Fed policy. It might also have to do with those low interest […] ...

Great Questions from Paul Krugman

Fri, 17 May 2013 19:21:50 GMT

Source: owenzidar.wordpress.com --- Friday, May 17, 2013
Why have profits been so strong in a weak economy? Why, with profits so high, don’t businesses find reason to invest more (equipment investment is actually fairly strong, but construction remains weak). (For the seriously wonkish, why do average and marginal q seem to be so different?) His full post is here . ...

When will Krugman endorse the Gang of 8 amnesty?

Fri, 17 May 2013 06:47:00 GMT

Source: dailycaller.com --- Thursday, May 16, 2013
Things to come: Isn’t it time for the inevitable Paul Krugman column endorsing the Schumer-Rubio amnesty plan? True, in the past, Krugman has expressed strong reservations (collected by John T. Bennett here) about the labor market effect of massive unskilled immigration. For example, “Because Mexican immigrants have much less education than the average U.S. worker, they increase the supply of [...] ...

Krugman name checks Naomi Klein

Fri, 17 May 2013 06:30:15 GMT

Source: www.correntewire.com --- Thursday, May 16, 2013
That's remarkable ! Read below the fold... ...

Paul Krugman citing Naomi Klein and Michael Kalecki on the strategic underpinnin...

Fri, 17 May 2013 01:44:09 GMT

Source: www.facebook.com --- Thursday, May 16, 2013
Paul Krugman citing Naomi Klein and Michael Kalecki on the strategic underpinnings of current austerity-regimes; is this mainstream economist on the verge of defecting to the side of the People? "So one way to see the drive for austerity is as an application of a sort of reverse Hippocratic oath: 'First, do nothing to mitigate harm'. For the people must suffer if neoliberal reforms are to prosper." The Smith/Klein/Kalecki Theory of Austerity Krugman.blogs.nytimes.com No pain (for you), no gain (for us). ...

Seven Howlers from Michael Kinsley's Very Misguided War Against Paul Krugman

Thu, 16 May 2013 13:47:18 GMT

Source: delong.typepad.com --- Thursday, May 16, 2013
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? Michael Kinsley is really confused: People who favor austerity are “austerians,” a clever Krugman coinage that makes adherents sound like aliens from another planet… Ummm… If you Google "first use of austerian" Google tells you about first uses of "Australian". If you Google "first use of austerian -Australian" Google tries to send you to first uses of "Austrian" that do not contain "Australian". If you tell Google you are serious, it sends you to WordSpy, which says: "Remember, the political idea being expressed a year ago was that because the GOP interpreted its 1994 mandate as a call to budget-balancing austerity, the electorate would never give the White House to the GOP if its nominee was also a root-canal austerian." —Jude Wanniski, "Reminder from Forbes… Crossroads for Dole," The Washington Times, March 20, 1996. So not Paul Krugman. Jude Wanninski. Howler #1. Kinsley goes on: It’s easier to describe what the anti-austerians believe than the austerians themselves. Anti-austerians believe that governments around the world need to stop worrying about their debts for a while and continue pouring money into the economy until the threat of recession or worse is well and truly over. Austerians want the opposite. But what is the opposite? Is President Barack Obama, for example, an austerian? To Republicans and conservatives, yes… These two howlers--ascription of "austerian" to Krugma ...

Paul Krugman's Misguided Moral Crusade Against Austerity

Thu, 16 May 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Source: www.newrepublic.com --- Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Feeling perhaps that columnist Paul Krugman hasn't made the point emphatically enough, The New York Times Monday published an op-ed shocker by two academics with the title, " How Austerity Ki ...

Krugman on austerity

Wed, 15 May 2013 07:56:00 GMT

Source: gaddeswarup.blogspot.com --- Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Krugman has a readable account on the austerity craze in How the casre for austerity has crumbled? Though hje notes that " It’s also worth noting that while economic policy since the financial crisis looks like a dismal failure by most measures, it hasn’t been so bad for the wealthy. ", but does not mention Kalecki. \ From Aditya Chakrabort's account of Klechi's 1944 paper Political aspects of full employment " His article, Political Aspects of Full Employment , explains with an almost eery prescience why the coalition is attacking our wages, our working terms and conditions and our welfare state. The tone is exhilaratingly brisk. "A solid majority of economists" agree on how to solve a slump, Kalecki says. The government borrows more and invests the cash either in building schools and hospitals or in providing benefits and tax cuts; this boosts demand and generates employment. Ta-da! Two pages in, and he has both fixed the problem of recessions and despatched most of the arguments against public borrowing that we have heard with such tedious frequency in the past five years. What if savers become wary of lending to the state? Then, Kalecki says, the Treasury pays higher interest rates – and, since most of its lenders are British (just like now), the money will still flow back into the economy. But he notes that Churchill's war coalition has run "astronomical budget deficits", while "the rate of interest has shown no rise s ...

Paul Krugman: Austerity economics is in a very bad way. Its predictions have pro...

Tue, 14 May 2013 20:29:33 GMT

Source: www.facebook.com --- Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Paul Krugman: Austerity economics is in a very bad way. Its predictions have proved utterly wrong; its founding academic documents have become the objects of much ridicule. Why did it get such a powerful grip on elite opinion in the first place? How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled by Paul Krugman www.nybooks.com Austerity economics is in a very bad way. Its predictions have proved utterly wrong; its founding academic documents haven’t just lost their canonized status, they’ve become the objects of much ridicule. Why did it get such a powerful grip on elite opinion in the first place? ...

Paul Krugman “Was” Right

Mon, 13 May 2013 13:03:43 GMT

Source: financialsurvivalnetwork.com --- Monday, May 13, 2013
by Mike Shedlock MISH’S Global Economic Trend Analysis Before discussing Paul Krugman and how right he was, let’s first take a look at the Spiegel Online report EU To Impose Tariffs on Chinese Solar Panels . Back in 2008, the German solar manufacturing industry was riding the crest of a wave of growth fuelled by generous subsidies and high demand. That year, the darling of the German solar industry, SolarWorld, logged a 31 percent annual increase in revenue for a total of €900 million ($1.18 billion) and expanded its operations by opening North America’s largest solar cell plant. Four short years later, in 2012, the company announced €492 million in losses, and today SolarWorld is in the midst of a major debt restructuring deal to stave off bankruptcy. Ironically, SolarWorld made it just long enough to see the success of the effort it spearheaded to slap tariffs on Chinese companies it suspected of conducting price dumping in order to wipe out the competition. Continue Reading at GlobalEconomicAnalysis.Blogspot.ca… Tweet ...

Paul Krugman 'Was' Right

Mon, 13 May 2013 12:44:45 GMT

Source: www.safehaven.com --- Monday, May 13, 2013
It is a simple statement of fact that the more goods and services we receive for our money, the better off we all are. The cheaper, the better! Time and time again we forget free trade and lower prices are a benefit! Read More... ...

Paul Krugman "Was" Right (1091909)

Mon, 13 May 2013 11:30:15 GMT

Source: www.rtable.net --- Monday, May 13, 2013
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Paul Krugman agrees that budget cuts did not help Europe's debt crisis.

Mon, 13 May 2013 08:30:00 GMT

Source: www.facebook.com --- Monday, May 13, 2013
Paul Krugman agrees that budget cuts did not help Europe's debt crisis. All About the ECB Krugman.blogs.nytimes.com And nothing to do with austerity. ...

I don't understand Paul Krugman

Sun, 12 May 2013 06:00:18 GMT

Source: patrick.net --- Saturday, May 11, 2013
Recent Comments theoakman says iwog says nw888 says I understand the differences you outlined, but they have no bearing on the discussion at hand. They are EXTREMELY important. Krugman is making a very limited point about the Euro being a fixed measure of value against widely disparate nations and economies. There are strict rules to belong to the Eurozone and these rules do NOT apply to the United States. Much is said regarding tax policy. You don't think it's important that the central bank is completely divorced from a member government? In this country, if the economy is in trouble the federal government passes a stimulus bill which is then paid for through borrowing. Greece can't do that. Strict rules? How many nations are following these so called strict rules?... theoakman says Krugman is a serial liar. He caters to his audience and gets paid millions for traveling the university circuit lecturing and slapping his name onto textbooks he didn't write. My favorite part of his blog is whenever it snows. I actually live about 3/4 of a mile away from him in Princeton. His house is huge (especially for not having any kids). But anyway, whenever it snows, he pays some guy to plow it for him and then he goes and snaps a photo of him with his shovel at the end of the driveway and posts it up on his blog saying how exhausted he is shoveling snow.... nw888 says iwog says In this country, if the economy is in trouble the federal gover ...