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KRUGMAN: Erskine Bowles, Alan Greenspan, And The WSJ Editorial Board Are All Basically Members Of A Doomsday Cult Joe WeisenthalDec. 24, 2012, 5:55 AM We liked this note that was sent out by SocGen's Kit Juckes this morning: It wouldn't be Christmas without Paul Krugman telling the US government it's OK to spend money. Krugman thinks that anyone who worries about a disaster coming from the scale of US debt is a doom-mongerer. Especially the WSJ. That's snarky, but that is what Krugman's Christmas eve column is about. Essentially it's a reminder of one of his favorite topics: That the...

We are not having a debt crisis. It’s important to make this point, because I keep seeing articles about the “fiscal cliff” that do, in fact, describe it — often in the headline — as a debt crisis. But it isn’t. The U.S. government is having no trouble borrowing to cover its deficit. In fact, its borrowing costs are near historic lows. And even the confrontation over the debt ceiling that looms a few months from now if we do somehow manage to avoid going over the fiscal cliff isn’t really about debt. No, what we’re having is a political...

If there is one thing better than Marc Faber providing a free, must-watch (and listen) 50 minute lecture on virtually everything that has transpired in the end days of modern capitalism, starting with who caused it, adjustable rate mortgages, leverage, why did the Fed let Lehman fail, why was AIG bailed out, quantitative easing, Operation Twist, where the interest on the debt is going, which bubbles he is most concerned about, a discussion of gold and silver, and culminating with his views on a world reserve currency, is him saying the following: "The views of the Keynesians like Mr. Krugman...

The PBS NewsHour has yet to invite a strong conservative on the program to talk about the fiscal cliff. Tuesday night they had New York Times columnist, left-wing economist, and Obama cheerleader Paul Krugman to detail his view. Wednesday night they had moderately-conservative Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn), but last night was the most interesting. PBS invited the Norquist of the left, Max Richtman, of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, who insisted we shouldn’t be in a rush to reform our entitlement spending. After all, when the unfunded liability of both programs is around $100 trillion, what’s...

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman calls out lots of folks for predicting that our fiscal and monetary policies would produce hyperinflation. Shouldn’t these people rethink their basic economic models, he asks? That’s a fair enough point. If your model was telling you that zero-interest rates or budget deficits at recent levels would produce very high price inflation, there’s probably something wrong with it. Yet the past couple of years have been truly extraordinary. Opportunities for revising the way you think about the economy have arisen over and over again. The only thing you needed to take advantage of these...

The Twinkie, it turns out, was introduced way back in 1930. In our memories, however, the iconic snack will forever be identified with the 1950s, when Hostess popularized the brand by sponsoring “The Howdy Doody Show.” And the demise of Hostess has unleashed a wave of baby boomer nostalgia for a seemingly more innocent time. Needless to say, it wasn’t really innocent. But the ’50s — the Twinkie Era — do offer lessons that remain relevant in the 21st century. Above all, the success of the postwar American economy demonstrates that, contrary to today’s conservative orthodoxy, you can have prosperity...

Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo may have been the first person to use the term “austerity bomb” for the expired tax cuts and automatic spending cuts to take effect at the beginning of next year. Paul Krugman adopts the term in his blog entry "The Austerity Bomb" in the New York Times. Beutler wrote: “A giant austerity bomb is timed to go off at the beginning of next year, and the threat of significantly higher taxes and lower spending has Republicans running around the Capitol sounding more like John Maynard Keynes than John Boehner.” The term "fiscal cliff" makes...

Budget Talks: If President Obama wants to get a deficit deal done to avoid the fiscal cliff, his biggest challenge won't be Republicans, but his own hard-core left-wing supporters. Two days after the election, Obama's favorite economist, Paul Krugman, set the tone for the intransigent left in a column titled: "Let's not make a deal." Boiled down, his advice to Obama was this: Don't give in to any Republican demands, even if doing so would "inflict damage on a still-shaky economy." After all, Obama would be better positioned to "weather any blowback from economic troubles." Krugman's advice may be disturbingly...

Krugman Tells Obama: DON'T MAKE A DEAL Joe WeisenthalNov. 9, 2012, 4:25 AM In his brand new op-ed at the NYT, Paul Krugman makes the loudest case yet that Obama shouldn't rush into any kind of big "deal" with the GOP on averting the fiscal cliff. Liberals have been going in this direction for awhile, arguing two things: Hitting the fiscal cliff would not be a huge catastrophe right away, and the GOP has lost a lot of leverage, so there's no reason to cave to their insistence on everything. So Krugman tells Obama not to reach his hand out...

32 Years from Full-Employment- By: Larry Walker, Jr. - In the fairest sense, the U.S. Jobs Deficit has improved by an average of 30,000 jobs per month since January 1, 2011. And although this may be good enough for indifferent Obama loyalists, what it really means is that based on Barack Obama’s very best job creation averages to date, full employment is still another 32 years away. Based on yesterday’s Employment Situation Report, 171,000 nonfarm jobs were added in the month of October. However, since the U.S. needs to add a minimum of 320,850 jobs each and every month...

Lubbock, TX - The Department of Economics at Texas Tech University and Worth Publishers invite you to a public speech presented by Prof. Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, on Thursday, October 25th at 5:00-7:00 pm on the TTU campus in the Human Sciences Building, Room 169. Prof. Krugman's speech is entitled "The Crisis: Year Six", and will be immediately followed by a "Questions & Answer" session. Space is limited, so please arrive early. Professor Paul Krugman is the 2008 Nobel Prize winner and a Professor of Economics at Princeton University. He received his...

Measuring Relevance:: The U.S. Jobs Deficit declined by 73,000 in September, however since it increased by 72,000 just one month prior, the result was a net improvement of an entire 1,000 jobs since July.- By: Larry Walker, Jr. - The ever elusive jobs deficit rose from 11,760,000 in July to 11,832,000 in August, and then pulled back to 11,759,000 based on yesterday’s Employment Situation Report. Employers added 114,000 jobs for the month, while the July and August figures were revised upward by 86,000. Thus, the U.S. realized a net gain of an even 200,000 Nonfarm jobs in September. And, since...

t appears New York Times columnist and Princeton economist Paul Krugman is a frequent punching-bag for CNBC host Joe Kernen. On Monday morning’s edition of Squawk Box, Kernen took to calling Krugman and Huffington Post economics blogger Dean Baker communists while defending CNN’s Erin Burnett against criticism from the two. Burnett had said on her show Friday evening that commodity prices have spiked since November 2008 because of the Federal Reserve’s policy of “quantitative easing.” In a HuffPost fact-check article aimed at “debunking” Burnett, Baker and Krugman were cited. “They quoted Paul Krugman and this other idiot, Dean Baker, who’s...

So far, most of the discussion of Paul Ryan, the presumptive Republican nominee for vice president, has focused on his budget proposals. But Mr. Ryan is a man of many ideas, which would ordinarily be a good thing. In his case, however, most of those ideas appear to come from works of fiction, specifically Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged.” For those who somehow missed it when growing up, “Atlas Shrugged” is a fantasy in which the world’s productive people — the “job creators,” if you like — withdraw their services from an ungrateful society. The novel’s centerpiece is a 64-page...

French president Francois Hollande wants to set the top tax rate in France at 75%, for those who make over €1,000,000 a year. As a result "Les Riches" Have Tax Indigestion and are looking to move outside France. “We’re getting a lot of calls from high earners who are asking whether they should get out of France,” said Mr. Grandil, a partner at Altexis, which specializes in tax matters for corporations and the wealthy. “Even young, dynamic people pulling in 200,000 euros are wondering whether to remain in a country where making money is not considered a good thing.” Because...

There has been plenty to criticize about President Obama’s handling of the economy. Yet the overriding story of the past few years is not Mr. Obama’s mistakes but the scorched-earth opposition of Republicans, who have done everything they can to get in his way — and who now, having blocked the president’s policies, hope to win the White House by claiming that his policies have failed. Many economists believe that the overhang of excess household debt, a legacy of the bubble years, is the biggest factor holding back economic recovery. Loosely speaking, excess debt has created a situation in which...

Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism, by Robert Zubrin (Encounter, 328 pp., $25.95) A ruling idea of the last two centuries has been materialism: the notion, as arch-materialist Daniel Dennett asserts, that “there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter—the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology—and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon.” One consequence of this belief has been the rise of antihumanism—the stripping from people of their transcendent value and a reduction of them to mere things in the world to be studied, understood, reshaped—and ultimately...

In August of 2011, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman attached himself to a theory that earned him endless mockery from the right. “If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months,” he declared, arguing in favor of the president’s stimulus package. “And then if we discovered, oops, we made a mistake, there aren’t any aliens, we’d be better [off].” Now, a little less than 12 months...

Michael Tanner  As Greece, and now Spain and Italy, struggle with the crushing burden of debt brought on by the modern welfare state, perhaps we should shift our gaze some 1,200 miles north to see how austerity can actually work.Exhibit #1 is Estonia. This small Baltic nation recently had a spate of notoriety when its president, Toomas Ilves, got into a Twitter debate with Paul Krugman over the country's austerity policies. Krugman sneered at Estonia as the "poster child for austerity defenders," remarking of the nation’s recovery from recession, "this is what passes for economic triumph?" In return, President...

Forget turning Japanese, an anxious-looking Paul Krugman appeared on Stephen Colbert last night to hawk his book and suggested that "Ireland is Romney economics in practice". Noting that Obama "inherited a Depression" but has unfortunately not taken us out of it due to a "whole lot of opposition from 'the other guys'". The Kaped Keynesian Krusader went on to note that "a recession is when things are going down but a depression is when things are down" and suggests an Obama campaign slogan "It's Not As Bad As The Great Depression" to which Colbert retorts that electing Romney would seem...