Showing posts with label Paul Krugman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paul Krugman. Show all posts

Saturday, October 11, 2014

News digest / Catching up on news (10.11.2014)

I've been busy lately for personal reasons, but also my laptop was out of commission for a week thanks to my 2-year-old (see photo), so below are some stories that deserved more attention than I was able to give them. If you've read these then you know (some of) what I do. Enjoy!

It took her about 2 minutes to do that. God love her, the little s--t.

"Scott Walker lost his fight for voter ID. He's still everything that's wrong with the GOP," By Arvina Martin, October 10, 2014, Guardian. URL: http://gu.com/p/42a3m  ANOTHER MAD TEA PARTY EXPERIMENT BLOWING UP IN THEIR FACES... CONTAINED AT THE STATE LEVEL, THANKFULLY.


"Bill de Blasio: From Education to Poverty, Leadership by Example," By Richard (RJ) Eskow, October 9, 2014, Huffington Post. URL: http://huff.to/1vR5knB



"Time for a Guaranteed Income?" By Veronique de Rugy, March 2014 issue, Reason. URL: http://reason.com/archives/2014/02/19/time-for-a-guaranteed-income  WATCH OUT, THE LIBERTARIANS ARE TALKING SOCIALIST REDISTRIBUTION!


"Some Americans Boosted Charitable Giving In Recession; The Rich Did Not," By Bill Chappell, October 6, 2014, NPR. URL: http://n.pr/1CPvxHk  CHARITY WORKS THE LEAST WHEN IT'S NEEDED MOST -- TIME TO STOP RELYING ON IT, IT'S JUST A FEEL-GOOD OUTLET FOR THE FORTUNATE.

"Why would anyone want to talk on the phone ever again?" By Jess Zimmerman, October 6, 2014, Guardian. URL:http://gu.com/p/426qh  AGREED: PHONES ARE ANNOYING AND INTRUSIVE.

"Firestone Did What Governments Have Not: Stopped Ebola In Its Tracks," By Jason Beaubien, October 6, 2014., NPR. URL: http://n.pr/1COVoPL  UMM... NOT SURE WHAT TO THINK ABOUT THIS ONE. KUDOS TO THE COMPANY FOR WANTING ITS WORKERS NOT TO DIE?  WELL OK THEN.

"How the Russian Orthodox Church answers Putin's prayers in Ukraine," By Gabriela Baczynska and Tom Heneghan, October 6, 2014, Reuters. URL: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN0HV0MH20141006   KBG AND NOW FSB COLLABORATORS.

"Voodoo Economics, the Next Generation," By Paul Krugman, October 5, 2014, New York Times. URL: http://huff.to/1s49pG2  DYNAMICALLY SCORE THIS!

"Oceans Getting Hotter Than Anybody Realized," By John Upton, October 5, 2014, Climate Central. URL:http://www.climatecentral.org/oceans



"Even if we defeat the Islamic State, we’ll still lose the bigger war," By Andrew J. Bacevich, October 3, 2014, Washington Post. URL: 
http://wapo.st/1vlnuxk    NOBODY GETS THIS.  IT'S LIKE TALKING TO A BRICK WALL.

"Regarding political differences, just blame biology," By Cynthia M. Allen, October 3, 2014, McClatchy DC. URL:http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/10/03/242055/cynthia-m-allen-regarding-political.html   KIND OF DEPRESSING, ACTUALLY. WHY DO I BOTHER?


"China’s explanation for the Hong Kong protests? Blame America," By Anne Applebaum, October 3, 2014, Washington Post. URL: http://wapo.st/1py9Y5S   JUST LIKE PUTIN DOES, BLAME AMERICA.  GEE, WHO KNEW WE WERE SO POWERFUL?? (YET WE CAN'T TAKE OUT A BUNCH OF YAHOOS IN THE DESERT??...)


"Big Food more effective than Big Government in tackling obesity," By Richard Williams, October 3, 2014, McClatchy-Tribune. URL: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/10/03/242079/big-food-more-effective-than-big.html   I'LL RAISE MY DIET COKE AND OLESTRA CHIPS TO THAT!


"Russia ends US student exchange in part over 'friendly relations' of gay men," By Alec Luhn, October 2, 2014, Guardian. URL: http://gu.com/p/42568  WELL IF YOU DON'T WANT YOUR KIDS TO BE GAY THEN DON'T SEND THEM TO THE U.S. OBVIOUSLY. JEEZ.

"Europe, facing common jihadi threat, has no common security policy," By Matthew Schofield, October 2, 2014, McClatchy DC. URL: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/10/02/241856/europe-facing-common-jihadi-threat.html   EUROPE IS INFURIATING IN ITS SLOWNESS AND DIVISION IN THE MIDST OF SO-CALLED UNITY.

"Your baby looks like your ex? This research is scarier than Alien," By Daisy Buchanan, October 2, 2014, Guardian. URL:http://gu.com/p/424kt    YES INDEED, DAISY, YOUR BABY WITH TOM LOOKS JUST LIKE GATSBY!



"Putin Supports Project to ‘Secure' Russia Internet," By Andrew E. Kramer, October 2, 2014. New York Times. URL:http://huff.to/1rPXsUi


"The White House Could Be Made A Fortress, But Should It Be?" By Ron Elving, October 1, 2014, NPR. URL:http://n.pr/1oAUG01   THE U.S. PRESIDENTIAL INAUGURATION USED TO BE AN OPEN HOUSE PARTY... WHO COULD IMAGINE IT NOWADAYS?!

"The 9 Biggest Myths About ISIS Debunked," By Andrew Hart, October 1, 2014, Huffington Post. URL: http://huff.to/YH0xKH

"Putin’s view of power was formed watching East Germany collapse," By Mary Elise Sarotte, October 1, 2014, Guardian. URL: 
http://gu.com/p/4249a   DAS IST KAPUT!

"Is The New AP U.S. History Really Anti-American?" By Emmanuel Felton, October 1, 2014, Huffington Post. URL:http://huff.to/1rM7XrO  CRITICAL THINKING IS INHERENTLY ANTI-AMERICAN, DUH.

"Obamacare's First Year: How'd It Go?" By John Ydstie, October 1, 2014, NPR. URL: http://n.pr/1ozUXR2   IT WENT PRETTY F-ING WELL: I GOT HEALTH INSURANCE AND SO DID MY REPUBLICAN UNCLE T.  'NUF SAID.

"Is America on the ISIS Hit List?," By Graham Allison, September 30, 2014, The National Interest. URL:http://nationalinterest.org/feature/america-the-isis-hit-list-11372   I'LL SAY IT AGAIN: THERE'S NO BETTER LOCATION TO STAGE A TERRORIST INVASION OF AMERICA THAN THE SYRIAN DESERT, NO SIR.

"Federalization as a ’Terrorist’ Act," By Halya Coynash, September 30, 2014, Human Rights in Ukraine. URL:http://khpg.org/index.php?id=1411869882   WHAT'S GOOD FOR THE GOOSE WILL GET THE GOOSE COOKED, OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT....


"Earth lost 50% of its wildlife in the past 40 years, says WWF," By Damian Carrington, September 29, 2014, Guardian. URL:http://gu.com/p/42vvx  SCARY. SCARY.  DID I SAY SCARY?


"Neoliberalism has brought out the worst in us," By Paul Verhaeghe, September 29, 2014, Guardian. URL:http://gu.com/p/42v9g


"Europe’s Austerity Zombies," By Joseph E. Stiglitz, September 26, 2014, Project Syndicate. URL: http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/joseph-e--stiglitz-wonders-why-eu-leaders-are-nursing-a-dead-theory   EUROPE IS WEIRD.

"The Economic Case for Paternity Leave," By Gwynn Guilford, September 24, 2014, The Atlantic. URL:http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/09/the-economic-case-for-paternity-leave/380716/   THE WORLD MUST BE PEOPLED! 
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Sunday, September 7, 2014

News digest / Catching up on news (09.07.2014)

Here's more good stuff from my mailing list that I didn't have time to re-post on TILIS:


"Russia sees a military solution in Ukraine even if the West doesn’t." By Editorial Board, September 5, 2014, Washington Post. URL: http://wapo.st/Yj13ir  


"The Senate Republicans’ foolish fight over ambassadors." By David Ignatius, Septmeber 2, 2014, Washington Post. URL: http://wapo.st/1w4aflz

"A second Sunni Awakening?" By Fareed Zakaria, September 2, 2014, Washington Post. URL: http://wapo.st/1lz1QpE

"Putin's Trap: Why Ukraine Should Withdraw from Russian-Held Donbas." By Alexander J. Motyl, September 1, 2014, Foreign Affairs. URL:http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141946/alexander-j-motyl/putins-trap  -- A CONTROVERSIAL POINT OF VIEW; BUT IF THIS PAINFUL OUTCOME IS TO HAPPEN ANYWAY, SHOULDN'T UKRAINE TAKE THE INITIATIVE?


"Labor Day: The Beginning of a Breakthrough." By Robert Kuttner, August 31, 2014, Huffington Post. URL: http://huff.to/1Chs0SW

"We need to tell the truth about what Russia is doing in Ukraine."  By Wesley Clark, August 31, 2014, Guardian. URL: http://gu.com/p/4x6hh

"A Market Basket of dignity." By E.J. Dionne, August 31, 2014, Washington Post. URL: http://wapo.st/1owAqLW  -- AT LEAST ONE CEO NOW GETS IT; I GUESS WE JUST HAVE TO FIRE THEM ALL SO THEY WILL UNDERSTAND

"Russian nationalism and the logic of the Kremlin's actions on Ukraine." By Henry E. Hale, August 29, 2014, Guardian. URL: http://gu.com/p/4x5tq  -- REMEMBER, IN UKRAINE NATIONALISM IS CALLED 'FASCISM'; IN RUSSIA IT'S PATRIOTISM

"Why Russia Wants the Federalization of Ukraine." By Alexander Motyl, August 28, 2014, Huffington Post. URL: http://huff.to/1tH7Uxu



"Donetsk POW March: When Is A Parade A War Crime?" By Carl Schreck, August 25, 2014, RFE/RL. URL: http://www.rferl.org/content/ukraine-pow-march-war-crime/26548667.html  -- OF COURSE IT'S A WAR CRIME BUT FAT CHANCE IT'LL BE PROSECUTED

"Hawks Crying Wolf." By Paul Krugman, August 22, 2014, New York Times. URL: http://huff.to/1BJIHpT  -- I BELIEVE THAT 'CHICKEN LITTLE' IS THE MORE APT FAIRY TALE HERE.

"If this is real religion, then you can count me as an atheist." By Giles Fraser, August 22, 2014, Guardian. URL: http://gu.com/p/4xx22  -- TAKE NOTE, CONSERVATIVE XENOPHOBES: MODERATE MUSLIMS ARE SPEAKING OUT

"Never an excuse for shooting unarmed suspects, former police chief says." By Joseph D. McNamara, August 19, 2014, Reuters. URL:http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/19/idUS212937500020140819  -- IT WORKED IN THIS MISSOURI TOWN, AND GEE, ALL THROUGHOUT GREAT BRITAIN WHERE POLICE AREN'T EVEN ARMED!
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Thursday, August 21, 2014

U.S. economy stinks because of greedy corporations?

Blodget accurately uses the word "greedy" and "short term" to describe how U.S. corporations are acting -- by cutting back staff, freezing most workers' wages, and buying back stock. 

Yet there's another way to look at these trends: from an orthodox business perspective. Indeed, in my finance course in business school, we were taught that corporate decisions such as buying back shares and issuing big dividends may be popular among investors; yet such actions must also be eyed skeptically by long-term investors, since they are a signal that the corporation can currently find no better use of its profit, such as R&D or capital investment.

  Now jump to the "job creators" myth, and you'll understand why this is relevant: every time Wall Street cheers these short-term gains in stock price, U.S. workers are losing out again, because either somebody's not getting hired or somebody's not getting a raise. And this means less consumption and economic activity (about 70 percent of U.S. GDP).  

 And this gets back to the idea of depressed aggregate demand, and why the "job creators" myth is bullshit, because the capitalists (people with money) and the corporate owners (shareholders) and officers, when acting rationally in a system where their customers don't have as much money as they once did to buy their products, stop investing and producing as much, because this seems like the sensible thing to do. And they all do this at once. They are prisoners in the same system that wage-earners and consumers inhabit; they're not divorced from it, at least not in the long term. 

 So this idea that job creators, if government would only get out of their way and/or cut their taxes, would behave much differently than they are now, is totally bogus and irrational, because although they are at the top, they are not the commanders of the system, nor do they stand apart from it. 

 In fact, as Paul Krugman pointed out back in 2010, and just about every business survey since then has supported, lack of demand (sluggish sales) is the key business problem, not taxes or regulation or general "uncertainty."  


By Henry Blodget
August 19, 2014 | Business Insider


GDP Growth
Business Insider, St. Louis Fed
GDP growth.
The U.S. economy is still sputtering. (See GDP growth chart above.)
Why is growth so slow and weak?
One reason is that average American consumers, who account for the vast majority of the spending in the economy, are still strapped.
The reason average American consumers are still strapped, meanwhile, is that America's companies and company owners — the small group of Americans who own and control America's corporations — are hogging a record percentage of the country's wealth for themselves.
In the past five years, American corporations have boosted their profits and share prices by cutting costs (firing people) and buying back stock. As a result, unemployment remains high. And wage growth for the Americans who are lucky enough to be working has been pathetic — the slowest since World War II.
Meanwhile, America's corporations and their owners have never had it better. Corporate profits just hit another all-time high, both in absolute dollars and as a percent of the economy. And U.S. stocks are at record highs.
Scrooge
Even Scrooge would be appalled.
Many people seem confused by this juxtaposition. If corporations and shareholders are doing so well, why is the economy so crappy?
The answer is that one company's wages are other companies' revenues. Americans save almost nothing, so every dollar we earn in wages gets spent on products and services (including, in some cases, those of the companies we work for). The less that American companies pay their workers, the less American consumers have to spend. And the less American consumers have to spend, the slower the economy grows.
This isn't a complex concept. We're all in this together. People make it complicated by casting it as a political issue and inflaming partisan tensions. But it has nothing to do with politics.
Importantly, it doesn't have to be this way.
There's no "law of capitalism" that says that companies have to pay their employees as little as possible. There's no law of capitalism that says companies have to "maximize short-term profits." That's just a story that America's owners made up to justify taking as much of the company's wealth as possible for themselves.
Ironically, this short-term greed on the part of America's owners is most likely reducing their long-term wealth: Companies can't grow profits by cutting costs forever, because their profits can't grow higher than their revenues. At some point, revenue growth needs to accelerate. But that won't happen until companies start sharing more of the wealth they create with the folks who create it — their employees.
Let's go to the charts ...
1) Corporate profit margins just hit another all-time high. Companies are making more per dollar of sales than they ever have before. (Some people are still blaming economic weakness on "too much regulation" and "too many taxes." That's crap. Maybe little companies are getting smothered by regulation and taxes, but big ones certainly aren't. What they're suffering from is a myopic obsession with short-term profits at the expense of long-term value creation.)
Corporate profits
Business Insider, St. Louis Fed

Profits as a percent of the economy.
2) Wages as a percent of the economy just hit another all-time low. Why are corporate profits so high? One reason is that companies are paying employees less than they ever have as a share of GDP. And that, in turn, is one reason the economy is so weak: Those "wages" represent spending power for consumers. And consumer spending is "revenue" for other companies. So the profit obsession is actually starving the rest of the economy of revenue growth.
Wages
Business Insider, St. Louis Fed
Wages as a percent of the economy.
In short, our obsession with "maximizing profits" is creating a country of a few million overlords and 300+ million serfs.
Don't believe it?
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Sunday, June 22, 2014

Krugman reviews Geithner's book 'Stress Test'

I don't care much about Tim Geithner or his financial memoir Stress Test. But Krugman's review of the book features many teachable moments so the review is well worth reading, especially as revisionist historians would like to distort what really happened.  Here's the first one:

Quite early on, two somewhat different stories emerged about the economic crisis. One story, which Geithner clearly preferred, saw it mainly as a financial panic—a supersized version of a classic bank run. And there certainly was a very frightening panic in 2008–2009. But the alternative story, which has grown more persuasive as the economy remains weak, sees the financial panic, while dangerous in its own right, as a symptom of something broader and deeper—mainly a large overhang of private debt, in particular household debt.

Krugman obviously and correctly goes with the latter story. The overhang of private debt -- particularly mortgage debt among the middle and lower class, and more recently, student debt, now about $1 trillion -- is the real anchor weighing down our economy today.

Next, Krugman points out that the FIRE sector is not synonymous with the U.S. economy, something that CNBC and Wall Street types seem to forget sometimes [emphasis mine]:

Whatever the reasons, however, the stress test pretty much marked the end of the panic. ...[S]everal key measures of financial disruption—the TED spread, an indicator of perceived risks in lending to banks, the commercial paper spread, a similar indicator for businesses, and the Baa spread, indicating perceptions of corporate risk. All fell sharply over the first half of 2009, returning to more or less normal levels. By the end of 2009 one could reasonably declare the financial crisis over.

But a funny thing happened next: banks and markets recovered, but the real economy, and the job market in particular, didn’t.

That's because the Great Recession wasn't just a mega run on banks that the "confidence fairy" could restore, via cheap money for banks from the Fed. Rather, the Great Recession was a problem of too much private debt dragging down aggregate demand and hence economic growth, in a vicious cycle:

The logic of a balance sheet recession is straightforward. Imagine that for whatever reason people have grown careless about both borrowing and lending, so that many families and/or firms have taken on high levels of debt. And suppose that at some point people more or less suddenly realize that these high debt levels are risky. At that point debtors will face strong pressures from their creditors to “deleverage,” slashing their spending in an effort to pay down debt.  But when many people slash spending at the same time, the result will be a depressed economy. This can turn into a self-reinforcing spiral, as falling incomes make debt seem even less supportable, leading to deeper cuts; but in any case, the overhang of debt can keep the economy depressed for a long time.

And here's where we get down to the brass tacks of the federal government's response, and the Fed's position (Geithner's) on that response:

Unlike a financial panic, a balance sheet recession can’t be cured simply by restoring confidence: no matter how confident they may be feeling, debtors can’t spend more if their creditors insist they cut back. So offsetting the economic downdraft from a debt overhang requires concrete action, which can in general take two forms: fiscal stimulusand debt relief. That is, the government can step in to spend because the private sector can’t, and it can also reduce private debts to allow the debtors to spend again. Unfortunately, we did too little of the first and almost none of the second.

Yes, there was the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aka the Obama stimulus, and it surely helped end the economy’s free fall. But the stimulus was too small and too short-lived given the depth of the slump: stimulus spending peaked at 1.6 percent of GDP in early 2010 and dropped rapidly thereafter, giving way to a regime of destructive fiscal austerity. And the administration’s efforts to help homeowners were so ineffectual as to be risible.

And Geithner, who was in the middle of Obama's inner circle of trusted economic advisers, opposed both stimulus and debt relief, notes Krugman:

Geithner also makes some demonstrably false statements about the public debate over stimulus. “At the time,” he declares, “$800 billion over two years was considered extraordinarily aggressive, twice as much as a group of 387 mostly left-leaning economists had just recommended in a public letter.” Um, no. A number of economists, including Columbia’s Joseph Stiglitz and myself, were warning that the package was too small; so was Romer, internally. And that economists’ letter called for $300 to $400 billion per year. The Recovery Act never reached that level of spending; even if you include tax cuts of dubious effectiveness, it only briefly grazed that target in 2010, before rapidly fading away.

And then there’s the issue of debt relief. Geithner would have us believe that he was all for it, but that the technical and political obstacles were too difficult for him to do very much. This claim has been met with derision from Republicans as well as Democrats. For example, Glenn Hubbard, who was chief economic adviser under George W. Bush, says that Geithner “personally and actively opposed mortgage refinancing.”

Krugman takes exception to Geithner's victory dance on ending the crisis and the Great Recession:

To the rest of us, however, the victory over financial crisis looks awfully Pyrrhic. Before the crisis, most analysts expected the US economy to keep growing at around 2.5 percent per year; in fact it has barely managed 1 percent, so that our annual national income at this point is around $1.7 trillion less than expected. Headline unemployment is down, but that’s largely because many workers, despairing of ever finding a job, have stopped looking. Median family income is still far below its pre-crisis level. And there’s a growing consensus among economists that much of the damage to the economy is permanent, that we’ll never get back to our old path of growth.

There's more to this story that Krugman forgivingly overlooks, such as why Geithner was so solicitous to Wall Street banks and not Main Street Americans. After all, Geithner "met more often with Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein than Congressional leaders, including the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader," in his first few months in office.  Why??


By Paul Krugman
June 10, 2014 | The New York Review of Books

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Monday, November 25, 2013

Bankrate: Americans still struggling to pay debts

Ordinary Americans are still de-leveraging after the Great Recession. Their continued debts are hurting consumer demand, which in turn is hurting employment and investment because companies don't want to produce or sell what people don't have the money to buy.

What can politicians do to ease the pain and get our economy going again?  Republicans' knee-jerk reaction is to cut taxes. Yet... the same folks struggling to pay their bills are the same "47 percent" of "entitled" moochers who already pay little or no income tax. And corporations are more profitable than ever, with billions of cash on hand. Meanwhile, Republicans urge fiscal austerity -- mainly by cutting "welfare" like WIC, food stamps and unemployment benefits for these same struggling Americans.

Something's gotta give. The Fed's continued quantitative easing is not reaching average Americans. If their struggles continue, then we can anticipate another decade of economic malaise: the "secular stagnation" theory.  In this context the risk -- the temptation, for some -- is to blow up another asset bubble to give the economy the appearance of health and spur consumer confidence, thus consumer spending. But we know that such bubbles burst eventually, leaving those same working-class people worse off.  

It's a shame our leaders can't come up with anything to break this vicious cycle, besides yet more asset bubbles that benefit business insiders, and free money for Wall Street banks that don't need it and doesn't "trickle down" in the form of loans to Main Street Americans.


By Polyana da Costa
November 25, 2013 | Bankrate

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Monday, August 12, 2013

Krugman: Milton Friedman too soft for today's GOP

It's really saying something that today's Republican party is to the right of Milton Friedman on monetary policy!


By Paul Krugman
August 11, 2013 | New York Times

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Saturday, May 25, 2013

Krugman: 5 litmus tests for true conservatives?

Krugman is totally right about one's values determining one's view on the welfare state. (I would say it's more a question of aesthetics.)  It's not something you can really debate. Believe me, I've tried.

There really are people who believe in the "work or starve" / "let the devil take the hindmost" philosophy of social Darwinism, and they make up about 20 percent of the U.S. population and the core of the Tea Parties and Republican Party.

When it comes to the general welfare, they are not interested in outcomes, but rather in ideology, in establishing ideal, Randian rules of the game that don't impede the unlimited accumulation of wealth with no responsibility to give anything back.  For them that belief is ironclad; it's beyond argument.

Krugman offers 5 issues, on the other hand, that do hinge on results, on empirical evidence.  One side is definitely right or wrong.  For these issues it's not a question of values or what's "right," but rather what's provably correct.  Krugman observes that while liberals can and do disagree on these 5 issues, and still call themselves liberal without suffering ideological exile, conservatives must answer a certain way on all 5 or else be confined to an ideological reservation for "RINOs."


By Paul Krugman
May 25, 2013 | New York Times

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Monday, March 11, 2013

Fed: Lack of demand, not red tape & taxes, is the problem

Here's some interesting research from the Fed, based on National Federation of Independent Businesses monthly surveys of small business, that disproves what conservative pundits and economists have been saying about "burdensome regulations" and "uncertainty" holding back the U.S. economic recovery.

Read their executive summary and weep, teabaggers!

What explains the sharp decline in U.S. employment from 2007 to 2009? Why has employment remained stubbornly low? Survey data from the National Federation of Independent Businesses show that the decline in state-level employment is strongly correlated with the increase in the percentage of businesses complaining about lack of demand. While business concerns about government regulation and taxes also rose steadily from 2008 to 2011, there is no evidence that job losses were larger in states where businesses were more worried about these factors.

These findings support what Paul Krugman, et al have been saying all along.  Don't get me wrong, it's good to be a liberal, it's great to be right most of the time, but it's really sad and frustrating that the truth is so easily dismissed. Getting this stuff right affects the lives of millions!

 UPDATE: Just to be fair & balanced, here's a link to an article by economist Jeffrey Sachs on why Paul Krugman is wrong, why he is a "crude Keynsian." Maybe later I'll refute Sachs in a separate post, although I will say that the major points he offers are special pleading, not backed up by data.


By Atif Mian and Amir Sufi
February 11, 2013 | FRBSF Economic Letter

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