Tag Archives: paul krugman

BREXIT – Part 4

By William K. Black
July 4, 2016     Bloomington, MN

This is the fourth column in my seven-part series discussing the seven-barrel shotgun blast of articles that the New York Times published attacking the vote by those who favored BREXIT.  This column addresses Paul Krugman column on BREXIT.

Paul Krugman [Part 4]

Paul Krugman also wrote an attack on “populist[s].”

It seems clear that the European project – the whole effort to promote peace and growing political union through economic integration – is in deep, deep trouble. Brexit is probably just the beginning, as populist/separatist/xenophobic movements gain influence across the continent.

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Hillary and Bill and Paul Krugman Race to the Right to Stop the Bern

By William K. Black
April 8, 2016     Bloomington, MN

(Crossposted from Huffington Post. Postscript added for NEP)

Remember several weeks ago when Hillary Clinton was complaining that Democrats did not consider her a “progressive?”  Bernie Sanders’ big win in Wisconsin ended that tactic and propelled Paul Krugman and Hillary and Bill Clinton to race to the right, inadvertently proving Bernie’s point that they are not progressives on the key issues.

In the last week, Hillary and her surrogates have pivoted hard right and retreated to their long-held positions on the major issues.  Indeed, in several cases they have gone even farther to the right than the policies they pushed over a decade ago – even though those policies proved disastrous.  They also inadvertently demonstrated the terrible policies that were produced by the Clinton’s vaunted “pragmatism” and compromising with the most extreme Republican demands.  That was the story of Clinton’s infamous welfare “reform” – a policy both Clintons championed.  Tom Frank details in his new book entitled Listen, Liberal how the Clintons’ “pragmatism” and zeal to work with the worst elements of the Republican Party led to the welfare “reform” bill.    Zach Carter has just written the article I was planning to write about that travesty.  He entitled it “Nothing Bill Clinton Said To Defend His Welfare Reform Is True.”  I encourage you to read it.

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Krugman Triples Down on His Smear of Friedman and Bernie

William K. Black
February 21, 2016     Bloomington, MN

Paul Krugman is plumbing new depths of moral obtuseness, arrogance, and intellectual dishonesty in what is now his third smear of the well-respected economist Gerald Friedman in two days.  My prior column discussed Krugman’s two columns on February 17, 2016.  Here is Krugman’s lead in his column dated February 19.

On Wednesday four former Democratic chairmen and chairwomen of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers — three who served under Barack Obama, one who served under Bill Clinton — released a stinging open letter to Bernie Sanders and Gerald Friedman, a University of Massachusetts professor who has been a major source of the Sanders campaign’s numbers. The economists called out the campaign for citing “extreme claims” by Mr. Friedman that “exceed even the most grandiose predictions by Republicans” and could “undermine the credibility of the progressive economic agenda.”

That’s harsh. But it’s harsh for a reason.

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The “Debt Crisis” According to Bruce Bartlett: Generational Accounting

This is the last post in my analysis and commentary on Bruce Bartlett’s testimony to the Senate Budget Committee. There’s one very significant issue left to discuss, and that is the issue of fiscal gap and generational accounting and whether it should be institutionalized in legislation. I’ll begin this post with that discussion and then end the series with my overall evaluation of his effort.

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Paul Krugman Still Believes That “the debt” Can Be a Problem for the U.S.

The deficit is now down to under 3% of GDP, and in contemplating that fact, Paul Krugman asks why the deficit hawks aren’t celebrating the precipitous fall from nearly 10% of GDP a few years ago. He then explains that:

Far from celebrating the deficit’s decline, the usual suspects — fiscal-scold think tanks, inside-the-Beltway pundits — seem annoyed by the news. It’s a “false victory,” they declare. “Trillion dollar deficits are coming back,” they warn. And they’re furious with President Obama for saying that it’s time to get past “mindless austerity” and “manufactured crises.” He’s declaring mission accomplished, they say, when he should be making another push for entitlement reform.

All of which demonstrates a truth that has been apparent for a while, if you have been paying close attention: Deficit scolds actually love big budget deficits, and hate it when those deficits get smaller. Why? Because fears of a fiscal crisis — fears that they feed assiduously — are their best hope of getting what they really want: big cuts in social programs.

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Krugman Gives DeGrauwe 2011 Credit for What MMT Has Argued for 15+ Years

By Scott Fullwiler

In the comments section of my last post, Neil Wilson linked to this piece by Paul Krugman from last fall.  It’s a useful lecture in that it shows mainstream economists are beginning to understand that currency issuers under flexible exchange rates (a term he actually uses) are not generally subject to bond vigilantes, a condition that applies only to nations without their own currencies, debt in other currencies, and/or fixed exchange rates.

In the paper, as he’s done before, he cites DeGrauwe 2011 as the “seminal” paper demonstrating that Eurozone nations are subject to bond vigilantes while others like the US, Japan, and the UK would not be.  I’ve got nothing against DeGrauwe 2011 aside from his own failure to cite heterodox literature that preceded him by decades in some cases.  Ok, so I do have something against it, but not in terms of content (though I haven’t read closely so perhaps I’d find something).  And in fairness Krugman’s suggestion that DeGrauwe 2011 is “seminal” could be due to the fact that the latter provides a model (though the Kelton/Henry paper I cite below does, too; though it’s quite different, it would not be difficult to build on in the direction DeGrauwe 2011 moves)—and we all know that neoclassicals have difficulties discussing anything outside the context of a formal model (not that models aren’t extremely useful for many things, but they should not be the tail that wags the dog, and for neoclassicals they are essentially that).

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Krugman Now Disagrees with His Earlier Critique of MMT

By Scott Fullwiler

In a post yesterday, Paul Krugman notes the CBOs long-term projections for federal government deficits and the national debt now show a reduced projection of nominal interest rates:

This markdown has the effect of making the budget outlook — which was already a lot less dire than conventional wisdom has it — look even less dire.

After a bit of discussion of debt-interest rate dynamics—which I earlier discussed in detail here and in my series here (printable version here)—Krugman explains the importance of understanding currency issuers like the US versus currency users like the Eurozone nations for understanding these dynamics:

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Dear Dr. Krugman: Please Let Me Explain

By Joe Firestone

Paul Krugman can’t explain why the deficit issue has suddenly dropped off the agenda. He says:

. . . quite suddenly the whole thing has dropped off the agenda.

You could say that this reflects the dwindling of the deficit — but that’s old news; anyone doing the math saw this coming quite a while ago. Or you could mention the failure of the often-predicted financial crisis to arrive — but after so many years of being wrong, why should a few months more have caused the deficit scolds to disappear in a puff of smoke?

Why indeed are they so quiet? Could it be because the deficit hawks have succeeded in getting the short-term result they want, which is a likely deficit too small to sustain the private savings and import desires of most Americans, and also because the political climate is such right now that they cannot make progress on their longer term entitlement-cutting program until after the coming elections have resolved the issue of whether there will be strong resistance to such a campaign if they renew it? Let’s look at the budget outlook first.

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Professor Krugman’s Nervous Tic?

By Joe Firestone

Paul Krugman’s recent post makes some good points about the myth of the undeserving poor. But does he have a nervous tic? When criticizing conservative economic views, doesn’t he always seem to genuflect slightly to conservative opinion in order to appear “reasonable”? In this post he says:

“I’ve noted before that conservatives seem fixated on the notion that poverty is basically the result of character problems among the poor. This may once have had a grain of truth to it, but for the past three decades and more the main obstacle facing the poor has been the lack of jobs paying decent wages. But the myth of the undeserving poor persists, and so does a counterpart myth, that of the deserving rich.”

What “grain of truth” ever existed in this story? Where is the empirical evidence that the poor were ever more “lazy” than the rich or had other “character defects” (Not K’s words) that the rich don’t have in abundance, as well? I don’t think there is any. What the conservatives believe is pure BS. Some people are certainly “lazier” than others. But there’s no evidence that this aspect of character is class-based. It’s just prejudice, myth, and conservative fairy tales, which they embrace in place of authentic religion, run rampant.

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Bow down to the Bubble: Larry Summerian Endorses Bubbleonian Madness and Paul Krugman Embraces the Hansenian Stagnation Thesis*

By L. Randall Wray

{*Sorry, I couldn’t resist. As many of NEP’s readers know, Michael Hudson has long advanced the argument that America’s policymakers have purposely created Bubbleonia—NOT to generate growth but rather to enrich the thieves at the top. And many of you are familiar with the work of Geoffrey Ingham—a fellow Chartalist traveler—who has focused on J.M. Keynes’s “Babylonian madness”, the period after Keynes had discovered the writings of A.Mitchell Innes that led him to explore the origins of money in Babylonia. Hudson is also a scholar of that period. Alvin Hansen reintroduced the thesis of secular stagnation, giving it a Keynesian flavor.}

Larry Summers has made a big splash by (finally) recognizing that the US has had a series of financial bubbles. (See here.)  Duh! Who wudduv thought? The Reagan years were just a bubble, driven by thrift excesses. The Clinton years were just a bubble, driven by dot-com excesses. And the most recent real estate boom and bust was just a bubble, driven by Wall Street’s thieving Investment Banks. Bubbles-R-US. It’s all we’ve got going on.

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