Academia remains incredulous as evidence accumulates that the Reinhart-Rogoff paper that underwrote much of the intellectual justification for austerity economics omitted important data and contained severe Excel errors. Some are calling it a technical knockout of austerity economics, handing victory to the anti-austerity faction of economists. Economic debates rarely end with a T.K.O. But the [...]

Paul Krugman takes aim at something that should have been a major talking point for progressives, even if lawmakers couldn’t touch it, for the last four years. There has been a void in talking about the budget deficit in real terms, in what it’s composed of and what it really means. First of all, to [...]

The election is 36 days away, and most of the media are churning out their profiles of undecided voters in Ohio and polling snapshots. Only Paul Krugman has broken the illusion, moved past the election and its expected outcome, and focused on the expected policy prescription that lies ahead, the desire of most of official Washington to slash the budget along the lines of a proposal that gets far more credit than it deserves. Krugman, a voice outside Washington, has no problem explaining to everyone that the Bowles-Simpson plan actually stinks.

It’s hard to even pack all of the falsehoods in Niall Ferguson’s Newsweek cover story into one post, so I’ll have to outsource some of this. First of all, the thing to know is that Niall Ferguson is always wrong about economics. I mean with remarkable consistency. He has been spooked by imminent hyperinflation fears [...]

Paul Krugman’s book End this Depression Now is predicated partly on a simple argument that government must act in an economic downturn as the spender of last resort. Along the way he has to explain that this is currently not happening, that per capita government expenditures have trended down over the last two years, and [...]

This is one of those things that explains why some people you see at Starbucks sometimes have QWERTY or FGHJK imprinted backwards on their foreheads. There are a lot of terrible economists, advisers and government officials from the last decade or two who ought to have the decency to follow Mitt Romney’s remedy to “self [...]

I know I’ve mentioned it before, but if we saw the same public sector growth over the last few years that is customary during economic downturns, or just growth consistent with population growth, [the unemployment rate] would be at least a full point lower. In fact, higher unemployment is a consequence of austerity, particularly at [...]

I don’t know how many Eurozone finance meetings have been seen as consequential, but we’ve got another one today, with the Greek bailout as the main topic. Greek leaders hope that the finance ministers will approve the bailout, after they gave final assent to austerity measures. CNBC quotes officials saying the chances are “little higher [...]

The Federal Reserve did not only vow to maintain a zero interest-rate policy through the end of 2014 (a policy that has its critics, incidentally). They also set an explicit interest rate target for the first time ever, as far as I can tell. The Federal Reserve took the historic step on Wednesday of setting [...]

You buy a hamburger from me and I give you a piece of hard black leather on a bun. You protest and I say, no, I’m still calling it a hamburger, so you got what you asked for. You start running around telling everyone I sell leather as hamburgers, and I get my local fact-checking [...]

Today, the Senate will vote on a motion to proceed on a bill addressing currency manipulators, targeted mainly at China. Reuters writes about it with the cynical headline “Senators court 2012 voters with China currency,” but yes, I think they’ve calculated that a bill that would save money, create millions of jobs over time, and [...]