Results tagged “Krugman” from Argento's Front Stoop

Today's Paul Krugman column in the Times nails it:

It begins:

"'"I am in this race because I don't want to see us spend the next year re-fighting the Washington battles of the 1990s. I don't want to pit Blue America against Red America; I want to lead a United States of America.' So declared Barack Obama in November 2007, making the case that Democrats should nominate him, rather than one of his rivals, because he could free the nation from the bitter partisanship of the past.

"Some of us were skeptical. A couple of months after Mr. Obama gave that speech, I warned that his vision of a 'different kind of politics' was a vain hope, that any Democrat who made it to the White House would face 'an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can't bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false.'

"So, how's it going?"

Not so well.

Later, Krugman observes:

"Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing."

Read the whole thing here.

Throughout our economic crisis, Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has been nailing it. His analysis and predictions have been spot-on, but his dismal view of how this crisis will play out has turned off a lot of people.

Once again, this week, reviewing the minutes of the most recent meeting of Federal Reserve's open market committee, Krugman finds the news, something that others may have ignored.

He writes: "Most press reports focused either on the Fed's downgrade of the near-term outlook or on its adoption of a long-run 2 percent inflation target.

"But my eye was caught by the following chilling passage (yes, things are so bad that the summarized musings of central bankers can keep you up at night): 'All participants anticipated that unemployment would remain substantially above its longer-run sustainable rate at the end of 2011, even absent further economic shocks; a few indicated that more than five to six years would be needed for the economy to converge to a longer-run path characterized by sustainable rates of output growth and unemployment and by an appropriate rate of inflation.'"

Krugman says this economic slump is unlike others this nation has experienced and will cause a great deal of pain and suffering before it's all over. Economic stimulus plans and rescue plans for financially troubled homeowners may mitigate the slump, he writes, but we're in for a long, dark period.

Is there a silver lining? He says we may pull out of it eventually, but it's going to take longer than we think.

Read the whole thing here.

Often, our own U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., gets criticized for his moderate stances, irritating those on the left and the right with his willingness to try to get something done.

He has come out in favor of the stimulus bill, albeit a compromise bill hammered out by a small group of senate moderates.

He explains his position in a Washington Post op-ed piece here.

It begins: "I am supporting the economic stimulus package for one simple reason: The country cannot afford not to take action.

"The unemployment figures announced Friday, the latest earnings reports and the continuing crisis in banking make it clear that failure to act will leave the United States facing a far deeper crisis in three or six months. By then the cost of action will be much greater -- or it may be too late."

Arlen gets it. How come the right-wingers, whose fiscal policies of the past 28 years have led to this disaster, don't?

Still, Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman argues that the centrist approach doesn't go far enough to fill the hole we've dug ourselves. Krugman, who has been right in calling the shots in this economic disaster, says President Obama erred in trying to forge a bi-partisan coalition in favor of the stimulus bill and that his attempts to do so watered down the Senate version to the point of reducing its effectiveness.

Krugman writes: "So has Mr. Obama learned from this experience? Early indications aren't good.

"For rather than acknowledge the failure of his political strategy and the damage to his economic strategy, the president tried to put a postpartisan happy face on the whole thing. 'Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate and responded appropriately to the urgency this moment demands,' he declared on Saturday, and 'the scale and scope of this plan is right.'

"No, they didn't, and no, it isn't."

Read his piece here.

It seems that nobody understands what's happened to our economy better than Princeton economics professor and New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman.

His column today begins:

"The revelation that Bernard Madoff -- brilliant investor (or so almost everyone thought), philanthropist, pillar of the community -- was a phony has shocked the world, and understandably so. The scale of his alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme is hard to comprehend.

"Yet surely I'm not the only person to ask the obvious question: How different, really, is Mr. Madoff's tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole?"

Krugman nails it. The expansion of wealth in the financial sector has come at the expense of working people in this country. Our economy, apparently, is built on wishes and fantasies -- the rich get richer while the rest of us go deeper into the hole the new robber barons have dug.

Read the whole thing here.