Paul Krugman's Blog, page 641

Warren report

Elizabeth, that is. The oversight panel's report on the TARP and all that is out, and politics aside, it's a terrific resource, with excellent short histories of what has been done at other times and in other places.
Interestingly,John Sununu files what amounts to a protest against any discussion of alternative approaches. Because clearly, nobody in [...:]

The bounce and the revision thing

It's now looking like a reasonable bet that growth will turn positive later this year, mainly because businesses will decide they've cut inventories enough, and ramp up production again. Many will herald this as the end of our problems. But they'll be wrong, for reasons I laid out during an earlier false dawn, back in [...:]

The trouble with airport delays

Long layover yesterday because of bad weather on the East Coast. The good news is that it's easier to find electrical outlets these days, and I have 3G on my notebook. The bad news is that every one of those outlets seems to be right next to a TV screen on which Wolf Blitzer is [...:]

Pooh Bah

For such a fierce (and smart) critic of current policy, Willem Buiter does use awfully gentle metaphors. "Take a leaf from Winnie the Pooh"?
Not long ago Willem and I shared a stage in Athens. We weren't that far apart on basics (the euro aside). But his image was dance of the seven veils; mine was [...:]

The financial factor

One of my long-running interests/concerns has been the decline and rise of US inequality over the past century, which is closely tied to the fall and rise of intense partisanship; here's one of the McCarty-Poole-Rosenthal pictures:

But what caused the fall and rise of inequality? A lot of very high incomes, both in the [...:]

One more time

Brad DeLong is, rightly, horrified at the great Ricardian equivalence misunderstanding. It's one thing to have an argument about whether consumers are perfectly rational and have perfect access to the capital markets; it's another to have the big advocates of all that perfection not understand the implications of their own model.
So let me try this [...:]

It's 1930 time

Barry Eichengreen and Kevin O'Rourke have an alarming paper in Vox EU, showing that if you take a global view, the world slump since early 2008 is as bad or worse than the slump from 1929-30. It's full of pictures like this one, showing monthly volume of world trade:

What this says is that the [...:]

Balance sheets and the trade cycle (somewhat wonkish)

Paul Kedrosky has the slides from a presentation by Nomura's Richard Koo on "balance sheet recessions", a meme that's been gaining ground lately. I'm in the process of trying to think this stuff through more formally; here's a quick note about where my thoughts are tending.
As I see it, the balance sheet recession approach to [...:]

Bank scams

Jeff Sachs comes down hard on the Geithner plan, and his worries need to be taken seriously.
I was starting to come to the conclusion that the plan would simply fizzle - that even though participating players would get a large put along with their free toaster, it wouldn't be enough to raise the price [...:]

Back on the grid

Sorry about the unexplained silence. We've been enjoying life, walking around Joshua Tree etc.. Back to the cold and the wet - and the web - later today.