Paul Krugman

Sixty Hours of Terror: “It’s Do or Die”, The Elephant, Oprah, Occupied Palestine, Iraq, Rajasthan, Faux News, Karzai, Rove's Memory Loss,Paul Krugman

baithak (Free subscription) | 18 hours ago

Interest rates: the phantom menace – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com

John At CIFT (Free subscription) | yesterday

Bear in mind that the whole problem right now is that the private sector is hurting, it’s spooked, and it’s looking for safety. So it’s piling into “cash”, which really means short-term debt. (Treasury bill rates briefly went negative yesterday). Meanwhile, the public sector is sustaining demand with deficit spending, financed by long-term debt. So [...]

• What the U.S. Long Bond Market Is Telling Us... - Grasping Reality with Both Hands

The Output Gap Model: Fatally Flawed

The Business Insider (Free subscription) | 6 hours ago

Could it be that the fundamental economic indicator that is gospel not only to Goldman Sachs , but to Ben Bernanke in estimating and determining monetary policy , the output gap , provides a flawed reading of the economy? As a reminder, Ben Bernanke has repeatedly expressed little regard for either commodity inflation or US dollar exchange as having an impact on overall US inflation. As Askari and...

The Weirdest Washington Game

Connecting.the.Dots (Free subscription) | 8 hours ago

After ten months in office, Barack Obama must feel he has been in a long tennis match with nobody on the other side of the net. In the stands is a chorus of Republicans yelling "Out!" at everything he serves, while jeering that he is moving too fast on the economy and too slowly on Afghanistan. On the other side, Democrats are weakly cheering him on but spending much of their energy fighting...

The Phantom Menace

Angry Bear (Free subscription) | yesterday

Robert Waldmann The one by Paul Krugman is a must read. what I hear is that officials don’t trust the demand for long-term government debt, because they see it as driven by a “carry trade”: financial players borrowing cheap money short-term, and using it to buy long-term bonds. [skip] the remedy should be financial, not fiscal. Have the Fed buy more long-term debt; or let the government...

Quantitative Easing

Angry Bear (Free subscription) | yesterday

Robert Waldmann Can the Fed do any more to stimulate the economy ? The question is back. The answer is only by making credible promises about the fairly distant future. My view is that this means no. I review the issue after the jump. Long ago Paul Krugman proposed that the Bank of Japan target inflation. In the new millennium this is called quantitative easing. The idea is that when an economy is...

I Blame This on the NHL

Angry Bear (Free subscription) | yesterday

With all the talk of "Detroit," you would think that Michigan would have lost the most employees, as a percentage of same, on the year. After all, the scariest graph of the U.S. MSAs isn't scary for nothing. But the Regional and State Employment data is out for October (h/t CR ), and there's a different leader . Apparently, the bursting of the Sunbelt Bubble (building expensive houses in...

If Only Wishing Made It So -- By: Rich Lowry

The Corner (Free subscription) | yesterday

It's always a peril of political punditry to assume that because we support or oppose something, it's therefore good or bad political strategy respectively (see post below on the interpretation of elections routinely offered by pro-choicers). There's a great example today. Paul Krugman attributes the troubles of the Democrats to their insufficient toughness on Wall Street . That may be a contributing...

The audacity of timidity

The Blue Voice (Free subscription) | yesterday

Paul Krugman assesses the consequences of having done too little in the spring to combat the economic crisis in The Big Squander New York Times 11/19/09: Earlier this week, the inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, a k a, the bank bailout fund, released his report on the 2008 rescue of the American International Group, the insurer. The gist of the report is that government officials...

• Viewpoints: 2008 AIG bailout squanders trust in financial system - Sacramento Bee
• Paul Krugman: The Big Squander - Economist's View
• See the 5 articles on the same subject

Wayward on their carry concern?

The Economist (Free subscription) | yesterday

What's really behind the deficit hawkishness? MY WORKING theory of the Obama administration's recent deficit tough talk has been that the powers that be believe any new, deficit-funded stimulative measure would be impossible to get through Congress without some nod toward reining in the growing debt. Paul Krugman seems to have been hearing some things from people who know, and he says that's not it....

Krugman: What Geither got wrong

SocraticGadfly (Free subscription) | yesterday

Clearly refuting fellow columnist David Brooks’ love fest for little Timmeh Geithner, Paul Krugman says the current Treasury secretary was a clusterfuck at the NY Fed, and hasn’t looked a lot better on his current job. There is no god and I am his prophet.

Krugman on AIG

Calculated Risk (Free subscription) | yesterday

From Paul Krugman writing in the NY Times: The Big Squander During the bubble years, many financial companies created the illusion of financial soundness by buying credit-default swaps from A.I.G. — basically, insurance policies in which A.I.G. promised to make up the difference if borrowers defaulted on their debts. It was an illusion because the insurer didn’t have remotely enough money...

Brooks v. Krugman

JustOneMinute (Free subscription) | yesterday

David Brooks comes out in defense of embattled Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner; former Enron advisor and current populist Paul Krugman argues that Geithner was a key player in the Wall Street bailouts that squandered the public trust. Krugman's focus is...

Gratuitous Doctor Who Reference of the Day

De Magno Opere (Free subscription) | yesterday

Courtesy Paul Krugman .

The theft of our future

The Localizer (Free subscription) | yesterday

"Taxpayers not only ended up honoring foolish promises made by other people, they ended up doing so at 100 cents on the dollar." --- Paul Krugman in The Big Squander (11/20/09) This isn't really news since we all knew this anyway. But, Paul Krugman's quote above really put the whole financial debacle in its starkest terms. The last two administrations have basically taken existing and future...

Obama So Far

roadrunnertalent | 08/06/2009

Three leading political observers grade the President's first six months BY Eric Bates Rolling Stone Magazine D uring Franklin Roosevelt's first 100 days in office, congress granted every request the new president made. Barack Obama, despite enjoying a decisive majority in both houses of Congress, hasn't been so fortunate. His economic stimulus package failed to win a single Republican vote in the