The Quote of the 21st Century: And you’ve got Greg Mankiw — well, I don’t know what Greg actually believes, he just seems to be approvingly linking to anyone opposed to stimulus, regardless of the quality of their argument. Either that, or it’s a description of everything that is wrong with the field of Economics […]

Willem Buiter, whose early posts at Maverecon were the epitome of restraint, calls for nationalisation: By throwing cheap money with little conditionality at the banks, the Fed and the US Treasury may get bank lending going again. By subsidizing new capital injections, they reward bad porfolio choices by the existing shareholders. By letting the executive […]

In recent days there has been a lot of gnashing of teeth among Social Security supporters at the prospect of even having Social Security on the table during next month’s economic summit. I gave a few reasons a couple days ago why we don’t need to let ‘fear itself’ rule us Obama and Social Security: […]

Robert Waldmann Pieter Beinart serves up some conventional wisdom in the Washington Post. Unfortunately he is totally wrong, because he hasn’t checked the facts in the past 7 years. Beinart wrote “Older liberals remember …. They also remember the welfare reform debate of the mid-1990s, when prominent liberals predicted disaster, and disaster didn’t happen.”Oh didn’t […]

Robert Waldmann Gary Becker writes (via Lane Kenworthy who is strangely polite in response) As Posner and others have indicated, there appears to have been a huge conversion of economists toward Keynesian deficit spenders, but the evidence that produced such a “conversion” is not apparent (although maybe most economists were closet Keynesians all along). This […]

rdan U 2 and the inaugaration

Robert Waldmann Brad DeLong has been denouncing Eugene Fama for arguing that an identity proves that the stimulus won’t work as advertised. Greg Mankiw attempts to defend Fama by arguing that Fama was assuming that the classical model, in which all markets including the labor market clear, holds. Brad DeLong notes that Fama made it […]

rdan Bloggingstocks points to well known mainstream economists coming around to an Angry Bear point of view: Up ahead: two bigger tasks What’s more, Wolf sees two additional tasks (structural changes) that are just as important to the goal of U.S. economic recovery — but that may be even harder to implement: removing toxic assets […]

Without need of comment: Embedded video from CNN Video

Or maybe I did. Given that Peter Orszag is incoming head of OMB and I am, well, me, odds are I am the one in error. But I can’t find it. Maybe someone here can help. This started as an exchange in comments on Is Obama Echoing Bush Andrew Biggs claims the following As for […]