Wish more people call BS on all the Crap that circulates on the media in my country. I was riding the bus about 30 minutes ago and the news reports were on the rising price of pork, the philippines meat of choice. And I was none too happy about how the report was done. Have to call GMA7 on how poor they report biz/econ news.
Washington Post Death Spiral Watch (Robert Samuelson Edition)
No wonder Paul Krugman’s ire was aroused: this is worse than I had expected. Much worse:
Robert J. Samuelson: Bankrupt Economics: What we are witnessing, in the broadest sense, is the bankruptcy of modern economics…. The $152 billion “stimulus” program earlier this year was a classic exercise in “demand management.” It didn’t work well mainly because this crisis originated in frightened financial markets…. Unfortunately, we lack experience with stabilizing financial markets, and the issue has been at the fringes of economics…
Do I point out that Ben Bernanke has spent most of his life analyzing the stabilization of financial markets, and that nobody but a blithering idiot would put him “at the fringes of economics”?
Do I point out that we have a lot of experience with stabilizing financial markets–that we dealt with a credit crunch in 1990-92, with exchange rate crises in 1992, 1994-5, 1997-8, 2001-2, plus others that did not become crises, plus a bubble collapse in 2000-2001?
Do I note that economists are now investigating whether the second quarter stimulus program worked better or worse than expected–which means that it worked about as well as people thought beforehand?
Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong.