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The Third Depression?
Jim
Randle reports, G20
Leaders Pledge to Cut Government Deficits:
Leaders
from the world's 20 most important economies set targets to slash
government deficits, haggled over tougher financial regulations and
compromised on a proposal to tax banks. The G20 meeting wrapped up
Sunday in Toronto.G20 leaders say the global economic recovery
is fragile and faces serious challenges, including growing government
deficits.The Greek crisis showed how large deficits can make
lenders worry that they will not be repaid, and keep them from making
the new loans, stalling the economy.Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper urged his colleagues in
advanced nations to cut their deficits in half in three years, but also
urged them to make cuts with caution."Here is the tight
rope that we must walk," he said. "To sustain recovery it is
imperative that we follow through on existing stimulus plans those to
which we committed ourselves last year but at the same time advanced
countries must send a clear message that as our stimulus plans expire
we will focus on getting our fiscal houses in order."Mr. Harper's point is that cutting deficits
too little or too slowly hurts investor confidence. But if nations
make the cuts too deeply or too quickly, they risk losing the potential
economic stimulus generated by government spending, something that
critics say could push the global economy back into recession.The
G20's final communiqué, hammered out by leaders behind closed doors,
also offers a compromise on a proposal for a new tax on banks.
Some
economists are worried about the push to slash deficits too early. In
his op-ed piece in the NYT, Paul Krugman goes as far as calling for The
Third Depression:
Recessions are common;
depressions are rare. As far as I can tell, there were only two eras in
economic history that were widely described as “depressions” at the
time: the years of deflation and instability that followed the Panic of
1873 and the years of mass unemployment that followed the financial
crisis of 1929-31.
Neither the Long Depression of the 19th
century nor the Great Depression of the 20th was an era of nonstop
decline — on the contrary, both included periods when the economy
grew. But these episodes of improvement were never enough to undo the
damage from the initial slump, and were followed by relapses.
We are now, I fear, in the early
stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long
Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost —
to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted
by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.
And this third depression will be
primarily a failure of policy. Around the world — most recently at
last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting — governments are
obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching
the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate
spending.
In 2008 and 2009, it seemed as if we might
have learned from history. Unlike their predecessors, who raised
interest rates in the face of financial crisis, the current leaders of
the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank slashed rates and
moved to support credit markets. Unlike governments of the past, which
tried to balance budgets in the face of a plunging economy, today’s
governments allowed deficits to rise. And better policies helped the
world avoid complete collapse: the recession brought on by the
financial crisis arguably ended last summer.
But future
historians will tell us that this wasn’t the end of the third
depression, just as the business upturn that began in 1933 wasn’t the
end of the Great Depression. After all, unemployment — especially
long-term unemployment — remains at levels that would have been
considered catastrophic not long ago, and shows no sign of coming down
rapidly. And both the United States and Europe are well on their way
toward Japan-style deflationary traps.
In the face of this grim picture, you might
have expected policy makers to realize that they haven’t yet done
enough to promote recovery. But no: over the last few months there has
been a stunning resurgence of hard-money and balanced-budget orthodoxy.
As far as rhetoric is concerned, the revival of the
old-time religion is most evident in Europe, where officials seem to be
getting their talking points from the collected speeches of Herbert
Hoover, up to and including the claim that raising taxes and cutting
spending will actually expand the economy, by improving business
confidence. As a practical matter, however, America isn’t doing much
better. The Fed seems aware of the deflationary risks — but what it
proposes to do about these risks is, well, nothing. The Obama
administration understands the dangers of premature fiscal austerity —
but because Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress won’t
authorize additional aid to state governments, that austerity is coming
anyway, in the form of budget cuts at the state and local levels.
Why the wrong turn in policy? The hard-liners often invoke the
troubles facing Greece and other nations around the edges of Europe to
justify their actions. And it’s true that bond investors have turned on
governments with intractable deficits. But there is no evidence that
short-run fiscal austerity in the face of a depressed economy reassures
investors. On the contrary: Greece has agreed to harsh austerity, only
to find its risk spreads growing ever wider; Ireland has imposed savage
cuts in public spending, only to be treated by the markets as a worse
risk than Spain, which has been far more reluctant to take the
hard-liners’ medicine.
It’s
almost as if the financial markets understand what policy makers
seemingly don’t: that while long-term fiscal responsibility is
important, slashing spending in the midst of a depression, which deepens
that depression and paves the way for deflation, is actually
self-defeating.
So I don’t think this is really about
Greece, or indeed about any realistic appreciation of the tradeoffs
between deficits and jobs. It is, instead, the victory of an orthodoxy
that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that
imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough
times.
And who will pay the price for this triumph of
orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many
of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work
again.
I also fear that policymakers are making a
major mistake by moving so aggressively to cut deficits at a time when
the global economy remains fragile. If you go back in history and look
at all the major recessions, they were preceded by major policy
mistakes. Either the Fed started raising rates too aggressively, or
governments slashed spending too aggressively, or both.
I listen to nonsense from some
commentators claiming that if the US is not careful, it will suffer
the same fate of Greece. Total rubbish. The US economy has as much in
common with Greece's economy as Canada's economy has with Romania's
economy. All those who claim "it's time to face reality" and cut
spending "or face the grim reality that Greece is facing" should be
careful for what they wish for. Their myopic focus on austerity could
choke off any consumer demand perking up at this critical juncture.
And while
some commentators fear a double-dip recession or that the "Great
Recession" never ended, I see hopeful signs of recovery. Stéfane
Marion, Chief Economist at the National Bank of Canada had this to say
about today's US consumer spending figures:
A large amount of
economic data will be published this week to help validate/invalidate
the robust earnings growth expectations for Q2 – the bottom-up consensus
is currently calling for a rise of 27% on a year-over-year basis. In
our opinion, we need nominal GDP growth of at least 4% for current
profit assumptions to be realized.After last week’s dismal housing data, it is clear that
residential investment will not be a vector of growth this quarter.
Fortunately, business investment and inventory rebuilding will more than
offset this weakness. However, to get 4% nominal GDP, the consumer
sector cannot retrench. Data released on Monday morning are
constructive. Consumer spending grew 0.2% in nominal terms in May.This
outcome was all the more impressive in that it occurred despite a 1.6%
decline in spending on energy goods. In fact, if we exclude spending
on all the non-discretionary items (housing, gasoline, groceries and
health), personal consumption expenditures were up a robust 0.4% on the
month. As today’s Hot Chart shows (see chart above), spending on
discretionary goods and services is actually set to accelerate to a 6%
annual clip in Q2. This performance,
the best in three years, is not suggestive of disarray in consumer
spending patterns.
While I see signs
of recovery, I also worry that policy blunders and this myopic focus on
austerity to assuage bond vigilantes will kill any recovery going on
right now. Below, please watch Chris Haye's interview with Dean Baker,
one of the few economists who correctly predicted the US housing
meltdown. Listen carefully to Mr. Baker's comments because he's
absolutely right on so many of the key points he raises.
»
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ozii that would only work when government debt had not gone too high
now the debt levels have gone parABOLIC
ALL PARABolic functions collapse
I surprisingly agree with Krugman. Public spending to stoke inflation is exactly what is required amidst spiraling deflation. Question is, where do you spend?
The obvious answer would be towards jobs creation. As I've said before, jobs are not a need or a want, they must have a purpose or more precisely, must be productive so I doubt that will make much difference. The old adage of digging holes and filing them back up comes to mind. Even if you returned all the outsourced jobs, the lack utilization will only destroy them again.
It's the consumer psychology that has taken a turn and that is certainly not repaired by throwing money at it. Consumers have lost their appetites after choking on too much cheap rice and chapati. And along the lines of that analogy, I doubt the kitchen hands and cooks care to sample their own menu.
All recessions were called depressions before 1929 so expect another world wide depression with an alternative name. Maybe we'll call it a compression this time.
Well, Leo, at least you've got Krugman and Martin Wolf going for you.
Even then, they all still have to fight for first place in kissing Bernanke's ass. At least the portico of the Federal Reserve building has enough room for multiple simultaneous taxpayer sacrifices --- and soon, bonfires of the vanities.
Leo,
Please start your comments addressing to specific audience-Short term traders and technical chartists;
You will be lost in chaotic comments otherwise.
I personally think that the juice of the 'recovery' is over and it is time for stimulus 2.0
This time around, the backlash for new stimulus will be intense after what happened in europe
The real issues will be on the table this time-
'why greece cannot go on taking more debt and should america do it as it CAN, atleast for now'
"If his recommended methods of "stimulus' is so efficacious, then why is the unemployment rate still at 20% after $787 billion from Congress and at least $1.25 trillion from the FED?"
Because the money went to the Banks, not the general economy. This is one of the general themes of ZH, as you should well know.
"I look at the chart of consumer spending that you published at the top of the article and to me, all the arrows point down!"
See above. No surprise.
"And the best that Krugman can say, like any other bankrupt debtor and the purveyor of any other bankrupt ideology is "if we only had a little more time and a little more money!"
No, that would be something like "If we had only spent the money restructuring the banks and in places where it would reach the general economy". You can put words in people's mouths, but it's unpersuasive when a reading of what they actually said refutes it (Krugman's archives are online, you know).
"The president of these United States claims with a straight face that he agreed to cut our deficit in half by 2013 and you bought it!"
History repeats itself. Herbert Hoover for Pres pins for everyone! Look, no one (not even Krugman) says deficits are a Good Thing. Right now, the Government is the spender of last resort, there is no credit, and the Banks are still insolvent. The plan should be very simple to understand: 1. hold things together 2. restructure the banking system 3. pay down the debt (or inflate). If we refuse to do 2, we're stuck at 1.
NAYK. Thanks for your comments on my post. I, of course, agree with your points. Cheers.
Don't underestimate your opponent, in this case the politicians and the banksters. They have a few tricks up their sleeves before they let this market tank. More printing, new regulations, debt default, currency re-balancing, more statistical propoganda (unemployment only 5% in one month), etcetera. Anyone expecting DOW 6,000 and SP below 800 is being lulled into a sense of imminent direction.
this is timely and true. for all of you mish shedlock fans out there - and i am one, here is what he had to say of leo kolivakis.
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2010/06/yet-another-keynesian-clown-steps-up-to.html
Oh my god! Did you guys see this?
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/
*sarcasm off*
Leo, your posts are garbage. Stop wasting our time with them.
I feel much better now.
So come on leo when will the job at cnbc be available
I think you would make a great replacement for that other idiot that left
kneale was him name I think
If I had a time machine I wouldn't go back and shoot hitler
I'd shoot keynes
hes done way more damage
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2010/06/yet-another-keynesian...
Yet Another Keynesian Clown Steps Up to the Plate: Leo Kolivakis at Pension Pulse
The Keynesian clown hit parade just keeps on rolling. Leo Kolivakis at Pension Pulse is the latest to put on the clown hat for The Third Depression?
Some economists are worried about the push to slash deficits too early. In his op-ed piece in the NYT, Paul Krugman goes as far as calling for The Third Depression.
I also fear that policymakers are making a major mistake by moving so aggressively to cut deficits at a time when the global economy remains fragile. If you go back in history and look at all the major recessions, they were preceded by major policy mistakes. Either the Fed started raising rates too aggressively, or governments slashed spending too aggressively, or both.
The Cause of Depressions
I am sick of Keynesian clowns who do not know the cart from the horse, who think debt is a free lunch, who think spending and debt are the ways to get out of debt problems and most of all never say how this debt is going to get paid back.
What causes depressions is an unsustainable runup in credit and debt that precedes it, NOT a failure to go deeper in debt.
Anyone who understands 5th grade math should be able to figure that out. Unfortunately, Nobel prize winning economists can't.
"I listen to nonsense from some commentators claiming that if the US is not careful, it will suffer the same fate of Greece. Total rubbish." says Kolivakis.
Three Examples of Total Rubbish
* People who think crack addicts can smoke crack to cure their addiction
* Alcoholics who think they can drink their way out of alcoholism
* Debt junkies (and Keynesian clowns) who think one can spend one's way out of a spending problem
In a sense all of the above ideas will "work".
In the first two cases the result is physical death, nature's way of solving the problem. In the third case, a bond revolt and economic death solves the problem.
Depression is Well Earned
If a depression is coming, and I think we are in one already, then it was well earned. Thanks to Greenspan and Bernanke, we had the biggest debt party and housing boom the world had ever seen, and depression is the unavoidable payback.
Yet parade after parade of Keynesian clowns suggest there should be no payback for that party, that life can go on, that all we have to do is keep spending money no one has, money that cannot possibly be paid back, and all will be fine.
Excuse me for pointing out the obvious Greenspan's attempt to defeat the recession and deflation in 2001-2002 did nothing but ....
1. Put off addressing the problem
2. Made a far bigger problem attempting to do just that
Thus, those same economic clowns will soon be saying "I told you so" when this recovery dies although the reality is there was never any recovery in the first place, only a mirage of unsustainable spending.
Keynesian clowns want to keep spending until the bond market pukes. As I said in More Keynesian Clowns Come Out of Woodwork ... No policy ever performs badly enough to cause its disciples to abandon it.
Leo leo leo.... I have tried to defend you over and over again, not because I agreed with what you wrote, but just thought you to be a nice guy.
This is indefensible.
Before you all get your panties tied up in a knot, let me be clear on a few things:
1) I do not buy Krugman's "Third Depression" scenario. This is a poor choice of words to scare policymakers into letting go of austerity measures.
2) I think governments need to enact some targeted cuts and reforms, especially on pensions, but the slash and burn mentality is dangerous at this time. Let the private sector show some sustainable strength first.
3) All of you who think QE has been an abysmal failure are wrong. The economic recovery is taking hold in the US, but it will be anemic.
4) The biggest policy flop is Bernanke and Geithner's view that you have to focus just on banks and not on the real economy. Banks have been printing money, shoring up their lousy balance sheets. They will continue to do so as long as their prop traders borrow at zero and invest in higher yielding risk assets. But one thing banks are not doing is lending to small and medium sized businesses - the backbone of the economy (they're slowly starting). Bankers say credit risk remains too high, but the truth is they prefer trading and are incentivized to do so through ZIRP.
5) Everyone on ZH should take a deep breath. The sky is not falling. There will be no Third Depression. There will however be a protracted period of low growth, low inflation, with pockets of speculative activity. The policy remains reflate & inflate.
Thank you for taking the time to read my comments and for your encouraging responses...LOL!!!!
1- Correct.
2 - Correct, but only if you continue to ignore the deficits, and unfunded liabilities.
3 - Correct, but only if you are okay with spending 2 dollars you don't have to get back one that never existed in the first place.
4 - Correct. But this contributes absolutely nothing to back your argument that the recovery is "gaining traction".
5 - Both correct and incorrect. For most ZHer's, the sky isn't falling. They recognize what's happening, and have either taken steps, or will adapt. There will however be a third depression. Leo, you CANNOT ignore the debt. It isn't serviceable.
"The biggest policy flop is Bernanke and Geithner's view that you have to focus just on banks and not on the real economy."
No Leo. Not stirctly correct. If the bank bailout had been for the purpose of buying time to let the banks work through their problem loans and write those loans down and clean up their balance sheets, I think people on this blog would have signed up for that. Instead the banks took the money and ran, didn't clean ANY of the mess (a great deal of which still sits on the Fed's balance sheet) amd made even more money than they did before and even more of it at the taxpayer's expense. There is a cancer in the system and the system will not be well until that cancer is exisced.
"But one thing banks are not doing is lending to small and medium sized businesses - the backbone of the economy (they're slowly starting)."
This is also incorrect. There is no need to lend when there is no demand for loans. Ther is no need to expand a business when there are no customers. There is no need to build inventory for sales that will not materialize. To hang your hat on a weak and one-off uptick in consumer spending is a stretch at best. You cannot have a 20% unemployment rate, and heading north, and extoll the virtues of a pick-up in consumer spending.
I'm glad you're not a weather forecaster. There will be no hurricane, just a protracted period of 74+ MPH winds, with heavy flooding, mudslides, and pockets of complete annihilation.
Leo,
I admire you for your personal health wars........my heart goes out to you.
BUT, " the recovery is gaining traction."
There is NO recovery "HERE" gaining anything............there are increased orders for heavy machinery....for overseas sales.
Just not in the US.
BUY THE DIPS BUY THE DIPS.. SAYETH LEO.
Only dips will buy into to this dip.. LOL\
When Leo burns, he burns brightly - thanks to his faulty and selective logic.
Hey Leo, explain the recovery from the panic of 1907 which took about a year. I am dying to hear this......
When the Titanic hit the bottom of the ocean floor, if only all those poor folks who couldn't find a seat on the lifeboats had just gone into the kitchen, grabbed a pot, and started bailing like crazy, the ship would have risen back to the surface. Too bad none of them was a Keynesian.
A simple lesson in economics Leo
what causes depressions are allowing huge credit bubbles and debt saturation occur
what causes great depressions are people trying to delay the correction that must occur
to bring debt levels back to normal. Once a bubble bursts there is nothing policy makers can do to make it better
they can only make it worse
now go and find another brain cell before the one you ahev dies of loneliness
how much did bernanke pay you to write this shite?
go join the turds somewhere else you are not welcome here
TWAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Don't give twats a bad reputation.
Gutsy Leo,
What a website! I still gush over Zero Hedge, although I get nightmares from here, to publish such a novel idea.
Too many inefficiencies built up in the system by the series of bubbles perpetrated upon the world by the Fed and Congress to get elected one more time have to be eliminated by correction.
One more $30 Trillion stimulus will not do it, although this government is sure to try.
The bastard children of politicians cannot do any more than cause more damage.
Who is going to build up the knowlege base of manufacturing? That sort of thing takes generations.
Blame it on universities, are they going to burn?
This is where you end up:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/7857595/RBS-tells-clients-to-prepare-for-monster-money-printing-by-the-Federal-Reserve.html
Tell MadHedgeFundTrader his "trade of the century" is about to get creamed.
Sigh. I'm afraid the patient is too far gone. Krugman is a madman. The BEA chart above purporting to show a recovery taking hold is madness.
I give up, Leo.
Leo, the best example of a solution is the one implemented for the Recession of 1921 which was over in months even though it had the potential to become a Great Recession or even a Depression, long or great. The solution was getting the public house in order and not crowding out businesses with state spending. The state never knows what to invest on to promote a recovery; it only knows to spend people's money a.k.a destruction of wealth. Private and publicly held businesses(not government sponsored or owned) know what to invest on to grow their businesses or they learn very fast as otherwise they will destroy share holders' wealth who are their paymasters(if government doesn't butt in) and will be turned out before they can complete that job. Unlike the state they can't use explicit or implicit force to make people comply with their 'orders'
"Unlike the state they can't use explicit or implicit force to make people comply with their 'orders'"
Yeah, and they can't commit financial fraud or cause massive environmental damage and force others to pay for the fix...
Leo, if the government can stimulate the economy with deficit spending as you suggest, why not go all in and get a GDP growth that would put the Chinese to shame? Let's do it year in, year out until we all drive Ferraris.
Yeah, and free oil for everyone too! Yippie, er a... Gulf!
Austerity or continued Keynesianism? This is the sort of argument that makes careers and wins book deals, albeit not because anyone is correct.
Take a side and hang your hat on it; that's what Krugman, Baker and everyone else is now doing. If you say "stimulus" and the government says "austerity", and the SHTF, history has "proven" you right. Similar for the austerity crowd if governments go all Bernanke/Geithner and it still blows up. Of course given that these guys are economists and not traders, they all survive anyway, no matter how wrong they might have been. "Who could have seen?"
What is never considered by either side is that maybe there is nothing that can be done. Maybe that is the real and only lesson Bernanke should have learned from his PhD study of Great Depression I. Maybe we all got too drunk and the hangover is inevitable and inescapable. Maybe we all have to just take the medicine and wait it out. Maybe the Keynesians and the Austrian types are merely trading fantasies. Maybe it's like arguing the choice between a tourniquet or a plaster after a beheading. Maybe dead is dead.
Actually, I'm a bit unfair...to the Austrians, who know the result of a debt binge.
That's what I keep saying, we need a new deal. Where do we go to hammer it out?
That's what I keep saying, we need a new deal. Where do we go to hammer it out?
Isn't it a simple point here that these radical ideas of US austerity are more like a chaotic "undo-stimulus?" Maybe the angry mob of ZH anti-spending should at least consider the damage of jumping around from dumping a trillion here and there to radical austerity on a political whim.
Doesn't this just mean losing the capital liquidity function? But of course the favors have still already been cashed!
Recovery gaining traction? HA! You can't have a jobless recovery - it just doesn't happen. And the crapola about profits being up is quickly put to rest when you take note that revenues are down. What is the biggest cost center of a business? Labor.
When it became apparent that the coronation of King Obama was imminent back in Sept/Oct of 2008, we started putting together the list of people who were going to get pink slips. When he showed up on TV in early January, yammering from behind his "Office of the President-Elect" lectern, we knew the jig was up so we dropped the hammer...20% of our employees - gone. Successful businesses don't lay-off workers when things slow down...if they wait that long they are screwed. You lay people off BEFORE things slow down. The same logic holds true for adding workers. Nobody (worth a shit as a manager) is going to hire workers in this environment. It is a lot cheaper to pay overtime and double-time to the existing people on the payroll, not to mention the fact that they are more than happy to get the OT. As long as this clown is running the show, every person on the payroll represents an opportunity for this administration to bleed a business dry with additional payroll taxes, insurance mandates, etc. People need to understand that hiring employees is not the purpose of a business...hiring employees is a necessary inconvenience at best.
Obama has merely continued in the long line of idiots who have served as accessories to the crime of running this country into the ground on behlaf of their elitist masters. Bush and Cheney were very key players in that narrative as well. So I don't mind bashing Obama as long as you understand that he is just another politician like all the others before him.
exactly right, also love your avatar....I'm gonna listen to "Live at the Greek" today as I watch my FXP pony run to victory.
The fundamental problem is that the state cannot supplant the economy's pricing mechanisms - particularly the pricing mechanisms for money - without ultimately killing the economy. The emperor not only has no clothes, but he's ugly, obese and insane. The king must die. But like a philosopher said, don't bother murdering someone who is committing suicide. Godspeed.
The brilliant Economist interviewee, Dean Baker, appeals (per usual lefty playbook) for sympathy for the unemployed. Those nasty European oligarchs are simply heartless -- they have jobs after all.
Look, times are bad. It is a reversion to the mean following a credit over-expansion. It's terrible. BUT...
What are the real policy alternatives? These learned folks (Krugman et al) think public sector expansion via debt and taxation, more transfer payments, and ultimately (we all know what they want) command and control allocation of capital and market space by the political class, these things are the solution?
It is the old game. Noble wishes for good outcomes used to justify the worst methods. And later, when the results are bad, more of the same bad medicine.
The patient is sick no doubt. It's a fine mess they've gotten us into. Now, restore markets, let asset prices reach clearing levels, accept lower compensation and benefits as a way of restoring employment and get on with the healing.
Yeah, just wave the capitalist grow-or-die wand and all will be fine. Never mind that the SYSTEM cannot possibly employ enough people (yeah, commie boy Marx was right on this point). You see, all that wonderful technology has displaced people; those displaced people were, with government complicity (it and corporations locked arm-in-arm in this system) hid the displaced workers in "service sector" jobs.
Now then, what happens to those "productive" jobs when the numbers of people who can afford the stuff that the robots are making?
Margaret Thatcher, 1976:
"Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other peoples money."
Seems like nothing has changed in 35y.
Hat tip to snopes.com for the source of this quotation:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/thatcher.asp
Yeah, and trickle-down works wonders!
All governments suck, period. Thatcher and her ilk are no better. Again, the promotion of grow-or-die whether espoused by Adam Smith or Karl Marx is still a big fat fucking FAIL!
There's a lot of stupid parrots on this board. It's starting to stink like the bird house at the zoo.
Add carbon!
The Party Line on ZH is Public Spending = Bad, Gold = Good, I'm not surprised at the vitriol hurled at Mr. Kolivakis.
Fortunately for Mr. Kolivakis, they don't give Nobels to "economists" firing off profound econmomic policy directives from their bedroom laptops.
Deflation IS still the order of the day, whether anyone here likes it or not. When inflation hits, wake me up, and remind me to buy gold.
Until then, you might consider holding the dumbest slander directed at people like Krugman, lest somebody find it in two years on google, as we slump further into the worst economic times since the Great Depression, and remind everyone of how really dumb it was.