THE REBEL WITH A PAUSE

Larry Summers (Obama’s economic adviser) keeps pointing out that the economy has recently been showing significant signs of improvement, and we are far less likely to face severe depression and total financial collapse than originally thought or predicted. Paul Krugman pointed out that this is not a recovery, only a “pause” in the recession, which is why we are now calling Krugman the “rebel with a pause”. He points out that industrial productivity is still falling, unemployment is still up and things are “getting worse more slowly”. With the constant debate raging between Krugman and the Obama team, we hope that this rebel is wrong about his pause, and if he is right we hope that the Obama people can swallow their pride and bring rebel Krugman on board.

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6 DEGREES OF TRILLIONIZATION

Recently, Paul Krugman pointed out that advanced nations have to have debt that equals 100% of their gross national productivity before they are really in trouble. The USA is currently just shy of 60%, which means that we have about 6 trillion dollars of safety net to play with. This doesn’t at all mean that we don’t have to work like crazy to fix the economy and get rid of all the bad debt and toxic assets, but it does put it into a slightly different perspective. In trillion dollars, that means we have 6 degrees of separation from some other countries that are currently leaning way over a far steeper cliff.

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ONWARD KRUGMAN ONWARD FRIEDMAN

One reason that I tend to view the articles, theories and philosophies of Paul Krugman and Tom Friedman so positively is that they have so accurate at proving what could go wrong with the “opposite theories”. Now, that doesn’t guarantee that their proposals on the economy and the Middle East (respectively) are right, but since they have never been tried we have to presume that they might not necessarily be wrong.

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MISSING BILL KRISTOL

Paul Krugman recently reminded us about some of the “predictions” of the conservative CATO institute, and it all made me miss Bill Kristol. First the predictions; Going back 2-3 years they said reforms have made Iceland a Nordic tiger, and later on they quoted the (conservative heritage foundation) said how Ireland became the Celtic tiger, and mentioned the Estonian economy as a “miracle”. Of course we know these are 3 areas which have crises far worse than ours, which reminds of Bill Kristol who when appearing on the John Stewart show was asked by John “Oh Bill Kristol, are you ever right?” We ask the CATO institute and the heritage foundation “are you ever right?” We miss you Bill.

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