Krugman

Archive for Krugman

One More For the Road

I’m actually in a hotel room right now, and I need to stop hammering Krugman on the bond vigilante stuff. But I see Gene Callahan misunderstood the point of one of my recent posts, and so perhaps I need to step back and explain why this whole thing is so frustrating. Krugman is saying that […]

Uno Momento Por Favor, Senor Krugman

I am not going to bother employing my army of employees to fact-check this, but it looks plausible enough to quote and walk away… (HT2 somebody in the comments of an earlier post.) Paul Krugman, May 2012: Matt Yglesias, who just spent time in Argentina, writes about the lessons of that country’s recovery following its exit […]

What’s Krugman’s Transition Vision?

Predictably, people reconciled Krugman’s two wildly divergent opinions on the dangers of the US inflating its way out of debt by saying we weren’t in a liquidity trap in 2003. Okaaaay, but can someone ask him politely (I don’t think he will listen to suggestions from me) to devote a future blog post to the […]

An Oldie But Goodie

Reading Krugman’s op ed on the “fiscal phantom menace” I was struck by this assertion: You’ve heard the story many times: Supposedly, any day now investors will lose faith in America’s ability to come to grips with its budget failures. When they do, there will be a run on Treasury bonds, interest rates will spike, […]

Krugman’s Conversion to the MMT Side Is (Almost) Complete

Krugman yesterday: There’s an interesting mix of contrast and similarity between the policy debates in Britain and the United States right now. In both countries — as in every country that retains its own currency and has debts denominated in that national currency — interest rates are near record lows… It’s very hard to come […]

Thoughts on Marco Rubio and the Age of the Earth

Hold on to your hats, kids, I think I will alienate 95% of the blogosphere with this one (and without even cursing)… Marco Rubio has been getting hammered in the blogosphere from both right and left for his coy answer when a GQ interviewer asked him about the age of the Earth. The irony is, […]

Krugman Ignores His Own Theory and Misses An Important Piece of European History

This whole “what danger is there for a country issuing its own currency?” argument is really slippery. First of all, what these people really mean is, “What danger is there for a country issuing its own currency and in which most of its debts are denominated in this currency?” I.e., even on their own terms, […]

Potpourri

==> Nick Rowe agrees with me that Steve Landsburg’s analysis of paying down government debt is only true if we assume perfect certainty. (Steve I think would totally agree, and that’s why I said in my original post that this was an argument over specifying assumptions for the reader, not about the implications of those […]