Paul Krugman

In today's New York Times, the Nobel laureate and recent White House guest begs the question: Why didn't somebody say something to warn the world of the financial crisis to come? Answer: Life is junior high.

... [N]obody likes a party pooper. While the housing bubble was still inflating, lenders were making lots of money issuing mortgages to anyone who walked in the door; investment banks were making even more money repackaging those mortgages into shiny new securities; and money managers who booked big paper profits by buying those securities with borrowed funds looked like geniuses, and were paid accordingly. Who wanted to hear from dismal economists warning that the whole thing was, in effect, a giant Ponzi scheme?

Paul Krugman, The New York Times columnist, Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Who fanatic and totally not dead person, is having some problems with his Times-sponsored blog, The Conscience of a Liberal. (Update, 2:54 p.m.: Thanks, Anonymous (not verified).)

Per Mr. Krugman's post this morning headlined Housekeeping note:

This blog is being shifted over to a new security system today. Since the elaborate software provided doesn’t seem to work — right now we're at the 'just click on that tab, and you'll get a menu' 'OK, I’ve clicked on it, and nothing happens' stage — it may be a while before I can post again.  read more »

• 1 comment

With the annoying confidence of the truly ignorant, television's chattering heads now insist every night that Barack Obama and John McCain "tell us what they're going to cut" from their spending programs. The droning chants for "cutting" reflects the traditional mentality of the national press corps, but it is hard to imagine anything less relevant or more stupid as we confront a deep recession. Fortunately the Nobel committee has just awarded the 2008 medal to Paul Krugman, so perhaps he will command the attention of these blowhards when he urges more rather than less federal spending (a view that has also been  read more »

This morning in a front-page story by Catherine Rampell, The New York Times took a moment to gush about its Nobel prize-winning columnist, Paul Krugman.

After listing the Princeton professor and columnist's many laurels, Ms. Rampell wrote:

In recent years, in his column and a related blog on nytimes.com, nearly everything about the Bush administration — from health care policy to Iraq to 'general incompetence' — has been the object of his scorn.

Along the way, Mr. Krugman has come in for criticism himself from both economists and lay readers.

One of those critics has decided to kill Mr. Krugman—at least on Wikipedia.  read more »

Earlier this morning we mentioned that New York Times columnist Paul Krugman had won the Nobel prize in economics.

Here's how Andy Rosethnal, editorial page editor of The Times announced the news to his staff:

To the staff:
I'm sure by now you've all heard the wonderful news, but it bears repeating: Paul Krugman has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics for his work on international trade and economics. This work, of course, is outside the twice-a-week column that he writes for our Op-Ed page. But to say that we're proud of Paul and his association with The Times would be an amazing understatement.  read more »

Few things have done Paul Krugman greater honor than the large, angry and often frustrated contingent of right-wing critics provoked by his New York Times columns over these eight years—until today's announcement that he has been awarded the highest recognition in his profession, the Nobel Prize.

It's worth remembering now, as many of those same critics prepare to raise churlish questions about Krugman's prize, that he entered the political wars rather reluctantly.

Without pretending to know him well, I can say that I like him personally as well as admiring his writing—and that when we first met in the fall of 2003, as liberals were at long last beginning to push back, he was still shocked by the ugly quality of the debate in a political culture dominated by the likes of Karl Rove, Roger Ailes, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O'Reilly.  read more »

The Associated Press is reporting that New York Times columnist and Princeton University professor Paul Krugman has won the Nobel Prize in economics.

Per AP:

"What are the effects of free trade and globalization? What are the driving forces behind worldwide urbanization? Paul Krugman has formulated a new theory to answer these questions," the academy said in its citation.
"He has thereby integrated the previously disparate research fields of international trade and economic geography," it said.

Mr. Krugman's prize is 10 million kronor, or $1.4 million dollars.

On his Times-hosted blog, The Conscience of a Liberal, Mr. Krugman humbly wrote, "A funny thing happened to me this morning …"

Once again, the right is up in arms, yelling that the Liberal Media is conspiring to distort coverage and silence opposing views so that their chosen candidate might claim the White House. Several specific developments account for the current clamoring.

One is the presidential-level press coverage of Barack Obama’s trip to Afghanistan and the Middle East, where he’s been accompanied by all three network news anchors and many of the most prominent television and print correspondents. John McCain, meanwhile, has taken many similar excursions but never received remotely comparable coverage. And this week in particular, McCain seems sort of like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone – left by himself while everyone else heads overseas.  read more »

Care for a bitter draught of economic realism to start off your summer weekend?

In his column in today's New York Times, Paul Krugman predicts that the housing market won't begin to emerge from its current slump until at least 2011, and that's because that market will keep slumping for a while. Waiting for a bubble to deflate is the opposite of popping a water balloon -- it takes a while.

And the overall economy? That won't begin its repair until 2010 or later:

It’s true that some prognosticators still expect a “V-shaped” recovery in which the economy springs back rapidly from its slump.  read more »

• 5 comments

Paul Krugman in The New York Times this morning on Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae:

[T]he storm over these particular lenders is overblown. Fannie and Freddie probably will need a government rescue. But since it’s already clear that that rescue will take place, their problems won’t take down the economy.

Furthermore, while Fannie and Freddie are problematic institutions, they aren’t responsible for the mess we’re in.

Still:

... Fannie and Freddie can’t be allowed to fail. With the collapse of subprime lending, they’re now more central than ever to the housing market, and the economy as a whole.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman brings his considerable knowledge to bear on all things from the economy to intellectual property to the elections in his twice-weekly columns. But on his Times-hosted blog, The Conscience of a Liberal, Mr. Krugman also plays media critic for his own paper.

In an impassioned post titled "On Not Knowing Who," Mr. Krugman scolds his colleague Sarah Lyall for writing the following bit about British TV series Dr. Who:

The show followed the adventures of a time-traveling character whose spaceship was cunningly disguised as an old-fashioned telephone booth and who saved the universe by means of immortality, brilliance, a mordant sense of humor and an array of useful enemy-thwarting devices.

"No, no, no!" Mr. Krugman scolds. "The TARDIS looks like a police box." (TARDIS stands for "Time and Relative Dimension(s) in Space.") He even provides a Wikipedia entry to back up his claim.

 

Paul Krugman just put up a post that's a pointed rebuttal to a statement made by Nicholas Kristof in a blog post of his own today.

Kristof argues that one of the reasons the media snoozed on the pre-invasion Iraq story is because Democrats didn't really attack Republicans on it. Without a fight in Congress, it's a tough story for the media to comprehend.  read more »

Today, Barack Obama decided to meet with an Amtrak worker and talk about expanding and improving rail service. The timing is not an accident.

He is alone among the presidential candidates in not advocating a cut in gas taxes over the summer, a stance for which he received an extremely rare bit of (conditional) praise from Paul Krugman, but for which he was attacked by his opponents.  read more »

One of the strange subplots to the Democratic primary race has been the ongoing feud between the Obama campaign and liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Mr. Krugman has argued that Sen. Obama's healthcare plan is too incremental, and more generally, that the senator's intention of working with Republicans and their allies, rather than taking them on, is naive and doomed to failure.

But could there be a thaw in the relationship? A few days ago, Sen. Obama told Tim Russert that his healthcare plan might involve a penalty for those who didn't get insurance, in order to deter the problem of free-riders and get closer to universality -- something Mr. Krugman had been calling for. In response, the Times-man sounded optimistic.  read more »

Two decades after he left office, too many Democrats still refuse to face up to the very simple—but powerful—reasons why their clocks were so thoroughly cleaned by Reagan.  read more »

The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus gets all bloggy in her column today, quoting the Times' Paul Krugman disparaging those who argue that Social Security faces a serious financing problem, then lining up passages written by Mr. Krugman earlier this decade in which he seems to agree that it does.

The attack comes on the heels of Mr. Krugman's spat with fellow Times columnist David Brooks over Reagan and race, in which, in apparent observance of an unspoken Times rule, each delicately avoided naming the other. So it'll be interesting to see whether Mr. Krugman responds to Ms. Marcus, and, if so, whether the rule seems to work any differently when the other columnist writes for a different paper.  read more »

The battle over Reagan and race that had been playing out recently on the New York Times op-ed page appeared to have subsided by the end of last week.  But it received new life over the weekend when Reagan biographer Lou Cannon contributed a guest op-ed asserting that "Ronald Reagan was not a racist." 

Today, Paul Krugman responds, arguing, as he has before, that Reagan used racist appeals for political benefit.  Referring to Mr. Cannon and Times columnist David Brooks, he notes: "Reagan's defenders protest furiously that he wasn't personally bigoted. So what? We're talking about his political strategy. His personal beliefs are irrelevant."

 read more »

The recent Brooks vs. Krugman (with an assist from Herbert) smackdown on the New York Times op-ed page has left a lot of people wondering: Why aren't Times columnists allowed to attack each other by name?  After all, doing so would make these arguments a lot easier for readers to follow.

Well it turns out that, as near as anyone can tell, they are allowed. So why don't they?  We've put in queries to Messrs. Brooks and Krugman, as well as Times op-ed page editor Andy Rosenthal, and we'll let you know what we find out.

Fine writers and close friends gathered Tuesday afternoon to celebrate the passions and the prescience of Molly Ivins.  read more »

I thought Lamont won, but then I'm crazed about Iraq. My wife and Imus both said that Lieberman won. He seemed far more rounded as a person. Imus called Lamont a pencil-neck.

But if Lieberman won, he damaged himself among the engaged, like myself. As Howard Fineman of Newsweek said on Imus, Lieberman seemed angry and rattled. He's in real trouble, and knows it.

Fineman also made a revealing statement: Lieberman had shown "courage" in voting for the Iraq war. This is the conventional wisdom now in Washington, where as Paul Krugman said so beautifully, To be credible on national security, you have to have been wrong about Iraq.

Why is it the conventional wisdom? Because all the columnists were for this war and they're still covering their asses now that even blockheads are questioning their judgment. As Fineman said in his role as a cheerleader in 2003 (per FAIR): "We had controversial wars that divided the country. This war united the country and brought the military back." Well, I remember disunity. I remember people saying, Not in my name.

Courage wasn't going along with a foolish idea that would alienate the Arab world and turn Iraq into a terrorist-breeding hellhole, it was opposing it. Ned Lamont's riding that wave.

Aspiring publicists take heed! Dave Platter proves that the "real-estate bubble" as a meaningful term has not only taken the summer off, but is heading for extinction.

It seems like only early June when we were discussing something called "the iron bubble" (subscription required) as a means of deflating some of the senseless bubble-talk about the New York market.

So I guess we're all done talking about the bubble, right? Wrong! The ever-concerned Paul Krugman had this to say only yesterday:

"Of course, some people still deny that there's a housing bubble. Let me explain how we know that they're wrong."  read more »

The professor's lecture (er, column) also included some new terms reporters can overuse this fall: "zoned zone," "flatland," and "the hissing sound."

Hiiiisssssssss. -Michael Calderone

Harold Evans and Tina Brown are, famously, editors.  read more »

The Roaring Nineties , by Joseph E. Stiglitz. W.W. Norton, 256 pages, $25.95.  read more »

On a fine summer evening a couple of years ago, my wife and I gave into nostalgia and paid a visit t  read more »

In Hollywood, the screenwriter William Goldman has notoriously remarked, nobody knows anything.Anoth  read more »

For those of a certain age-say, over 55- postmodern life is like living in an earthquake zone.  read more »