A week’s worth of Krugman
by digby
Lot’s of great stuff coming from Paul Krugman at various venues. Obviously, his homebase at the NY Times, but also PBS, which featured a week long series of interviews with Paul Solomon, including this one:
Watch Paul Krugman on the ‘Cartoon Physics’ of the 2008 Crash on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.
Also:
Krugman focused on Spain and Germany with critique from Terence Burnham: Paul Krugman on Europe ‘Doing the Unthinkable’
Krugman on his former boss, Ben Bernanke: Paul Krugman on Ben Bernanke’s ‘Green Shoots’
And this one with economist Robin Wells, Krugman’s wife and writing partner:
Finally, here’s Krugman and Wells in the NYRB reviewing The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery by Noam Scheiber, Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right by Thomas Frank and The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics by Thomas Byrne Edsall.
And excerpt:
If Geithner is the active designer of the Wall Street bailout, Obama is the passive enabler of Republican intransigence. Scheiber describes how, time and time again, Obama’s reflexive search for bipartisanship handed the advantage to the Republicans. Scheiber observes that “in Obama’s mind, ‘partisan’ equaled ‘parochial,’ or even ‘corrupt,’” leading to “making huge concessions before the [stimulus] negotiation had even started,” that Obama’s hunger for acceptance through bipartisanship was “deeply confused,” and, perhaps most damningly, that in contrast to Obama’s approach, “partisan muscle-flexing may very well serve the public interest, since there’s no other way to pass legislation.”
Obama’s innate centrism led him to adopt the preoccupation with the budget deficit of Geithner and Peter Orszag (his head of the Office of Management and Budget and another Rubin protégé) in opposition to vocal protests from both Summers and Romer that now was not the time to worry about deficits. As a result, Obama would never acknowledge that the original stimulus was not big enough, a position that left him boxed in when it became clear—as it already had by summer of 2010, if not earlier—that it had indeed been far too small.
An old story, told many times before by some of us, including Krugman, while it was happening. Again, I come back to the “believed their own hype” theory, in which it was supposed that Obama had an unnatural ability to bring Republicans on board. And as it turned out he actually had the effect of making them more intransigent.
There’s a lot in this to chew over, all of it worthwhile.
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