“One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that,” Orwell famously said. “No ordinary man could be such a fool.” Orwell might have been looking in a crystal ball and following the career of Paul Krugman.
Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist. He’s also, on the evidence, a complete and utter idiot.
He’s most famous for opining that, “By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s”. But his capacity for dunderheadedness goes far beyond that.
In 2002, Krugman advised Fed chairman Alan Greenspan to “create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble”. In 2006, he praised the Veterans Health Administration as a model example of government-run healthcare. In 2012, he lauded Argentina’s “remarkable success story” — just months later, its economy collapsed. In 2013, he floated the idea of Barack Obama minting a $1 trillion dollar coin, to pay off the national debt.
Krugman is still keeping the laughs coming.
New York Times columnist [of course he writes for the NYT!] and economist Paul Krugman insists the United States is not in a recession, that the term is essentially meaningless, and current efforts to apply the label to the U.S. economy amount to “vitriolic” partisanship.
Krugman has gone one better: claiming that the Joe Biden economy is “booming” so much that it only looks like a recession.
Suffice to say that a fair number of Krugman’s colleagues beg to differ.
Asked whether he accepts the Biden administration’s insistence that the country hasn’t yet slipped into a recession, Jim Bianco, founder of Bianco Research, told the Real Vision Finance program in a recent interview that, while it may be “shallow,” it’s a recession.
“Let me try and be clear here. Yes, we’re in a recession. Full stop, question over—a recession,” Bianco said […]
Cameron Winklevoss, founder of Winklevoss Capital Management, said in a post on Twitter: “I’m having deja vu watching Mr. ‘I was wrong about inflation’ dismiss the recession. Krugman is perhaps the most intellectually dishonest ‘real expert’ out there. Of course corporate media continues to give him a platform to spread misinformation.”
As Bianco points out, we only have the word “recession” because another Democrat administration — Jimmy Carter, in the 70s — wanted economists to back down from scary “Depression” talk. As it happens, it was Herbert Hoover’s Republican administration who gifted us the term “Depression”.
“In the 1930s, the Hoover administration went crazy because we used to call them ‘panics,’” Bianco said.
“Don’t call it a ‘panic,’ what we’re seeing, so they invented the word depression. So we went from ‘panic’ … the White House didn’t like that word, so we invented the word ‘depression.’ Then in 1978 they didn’t like the word ‘depression’ so we invented the word ‘recession.’”
“It seems like we’re now in the process of finding a new word to mean exactly the same thing,” Bianco said.
The Epoch Times
So, what’s the difference between a recession, a depression and a good, old panic?
I suspect that, thanks to good ol’ Brandon, Americans are going to find out the hard way that there isn’t much difference at all.