Congratulations Dr. Krugman
Obviously very well-deserved.
Of course, I am more-than-a-little biased.
A few weeks ago, I was thrilled to find out that this blog was on the reading list of an upper level Princeton course on international finance. So I am even more thrilled to be able to say that both this blog and an IMF working paper that Mark Allen, Nouriel Roubini, Christoph Rosenberg, Christian Keller and I wrote on the balance sheet effects of currency crises are on the reading list of an upper level international finance course taught by a Nobel Laureate!
Dr. Krugman also predicted a decade ago that Singapore’s state-driven economy would collapse to be replaced by the laizze-faire, Neo-liberal US Economic model espoused by the Clinton-Rubin Administration. LOL.
In recent years, the Nobel prize has become very tainted with politics. A couple of years ago, the Dalai Lama who espouses the formal independence of Tibet from China was awarded the Nobel prize. The Dalai Lama remains on the payroll of the US Central Intelligence Agency, and supported the recent violent insurrection.
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2008/03/23/the-role-of-the-cia-behind-the-dalai-lamas-holy-cloak-2007/
What a coincidence. This year’s Nobel prize in literature will be awarded to a Chinese dissident. The criteria to be nominated for the Nobel prize appears to include disparaging the Asian system of governance, and support of Clinton Administration’s Neo-liberalism political agenda. The Nobel prize committee needs to restore its credibility by repudiating any involvement in geo-politics.
P.S. And don’t forget about the Nobel prize award to the ludicrous Al Gore for the bogus “greenhouse gas theories” unsupported by science. Under the “hot gas” blanket policy, Al Gore calls for global economic sanctions targeting the high-growth Chinese economy. LOL.
Yes, and the timing of Krugman’s Nobel is a welcome poke in the Bush administration’s eye.
Nice interview today, Brad, on the BBC World Service Business Daily programme.
@djc the Nobel prize in literature this has been awarded a couple of days ago to a french writer. Are you speaking of the Nobel prize in peace?
Best BMH
All blogs should give annual prizes for comments, like a “runaway induction” prize, for instance (though I fear the selection process would be long and arduous given the surfeit of potential nominees).
DJC seems disgusted with “bogus greenhouse gas theories unsupported by science.”
Al Gore is not a specialist and I am unhappy that we rely on opinion makers who know very little science to convince the public. However, my dear DJC, you clearly do not much of environmental science. Global warming due to greenhouse gases is well understood (and an extremely simple phenomenon, really). The heated debate is caused by politically motivated naysayers and tolerated by scientifically illiterate journalists. In science 1+1 is always 2 — though that is certainly not true in politics.
Brazil’s President tells IMF carpetbaggers to get out of Latin America. Why isn’t there a Nobel Prize for Developing World political leaders that sternly oppose the Washington Consensus Neo-liberalism economic dogma?
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/djhighlights/200810140830DOWJONESDJONLINE000293.htm
MADRID (AFP)–Latin America no longer needs the help of the International Monetary Fund to get out of the global financial crisis, Brazil’s leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said Tuesday in an interview published in Spain.
“The time when emerging economies depended on the IMF has passed,” he said in the interview published in several newspapers including top-selling daily El Pais, adding “the time when Latin America did not have a word to say is over.”
Last week he criticized the Washington-based IMF, which in the past has given Argentina, Brazil and other Latin American nations advice on how to deal with their economic woes, for a lack of action during the ongoing international financial crisis.
“We can’t let the virtual economy surpass the real economy. A plate of food or the purchase of a house or car can’t be subordinate to an economy based on the exchange of paper,” he added.
It’s not really clear to me why, on such an excellent blog, so many people bother responding to a certain barely coherent plagiarist.
Other than playing “kick the troll”, what fun is it?
Flabbergasted,
OT, but have a gander at Climate Audit. Not all is as it appears.
The Fed has just sold paper for Gold from desperate banks around the world.
World government would be a lot harder if everyone weren’t so stupid…
Krugman deserved the prize for the work he did a long time ago. The other commentators carping is unbecoming in this context.
Personally, I would have preferred to see Luis Ignazio da Silva get the Peace Prize for what he’s done for Latin America than Al Gore, but that’s neither here nor there, and I think the opinion of the voters of Brazil probably matter more to the President of Brazil than do our opinions or those of any Nobel prize committee.
Krugman was appropriately honored for the work he’s done.
DJC and moldbug, I think you’ve come to the wrong place. Dr. Setser’s blog is a place for the unvarnished truth by way of insight and diligence, the vast majority supplied by him.
You appear to have mistakenly ventured outside the painstakingly curated bubble of right-wing lunacy, (where you can find assurances that global warming is a myth, ACORN caused the subprime crisis, the Iraq war was a glorious success, tax cuts are magic dust and a Singaporean dissident just won the Nobel Prize in literature, to pick but a few), and to have found yourself perilously exposed to the real world here. Understandable, given that most nurtured under its aegis don’t realize ‘the bubble’ exists, but dangerous nevertheless. Critical bouts of cognitive dissonance can not be ruled out.
So, for your own good, to say nothing of those of us who can’t be asked to pull the trigger, you really ought to scurry back to the Drudge Report, National Review, Climate Audit and the Powerline blog, where you can, like clearing a blockage in the lower digestive track, relieve the dissonance before it’s too late. That hissing sound you just heard means Fox News.com just got another hit.
Hank Paulson’s Orwellian Quote of the Day:
“The $250 billion taxpayer buyout of Bank shares is needed to preserve free market”. – Hank Paulson
Translation:
“The $250 billion taxpayer buyout of Bank shares is needed to preserve Goldman Sachs balance sheet”. – DJC
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/14/opinion/edbowring.php
HONG KONG: The $2.5 trillion combined bailout has aroused the resentment that surfaced during the Asian crisis a decade ago at a global financial architecture perceived, with some justice, to be weighted against Asians.
The deputy governor of China’s central bank, Yi Gang, recently castigated the International Monetary Fund for its almost total failure to put any teeth into surveillance of those countries – the United States and Britain – enjoying the reserve-currency status that makes it easier to run deficits. As he rightly noted, “weak financial-policy discipline resulted in excess global liquidity and disorderly capital flows.”
This should not be news. The unwillingness of the IMF to try to discipline these countries – America and Britain in particular – has been remarked upon often enough in these columns. It now makes a particularly poignant contrast to the IMF’s zeal for dispatching experts from Washington to discipline other countries’ economies – developing ones in particular. The humiliation of President Suharto of Indonesia in 1998 by the head of the IMF, Michel Camdessus, is not forgotten in Asia.
As many Asians see it, the IMF and the London and New York capital markets have one rule for the old, rich, English-speaking nations and another for Asian upstarts. Doing something about that, however, requires a degree of solidarity not yet evident in the region.
Dear Marjoram,
I hope you didn’t follow that link. It might poison your mind with Karl Rove’s lies. Stay strong! And remember – the Computer is always right.
CONGRATULATIONS, DR. SETSER
This blog, with the careful information and analysis as well as objective tone set by Brad, and the highest-quality economic dialogue found on the Web, is indeed the equivalent of a university symposium. Thank you to all who contribute!
Paul Krugman is one of the most readable writers ever to come along in the economics field. I have enjoyed many of his pieces and have recommended them to my classes. His book The Age of Diminished Expectations inspired my economics thinking for many years. I was very disappointed when President Clinton and the Republican Congress balanced the budget, as Krugman claimed would fix the trade deficits, and the deficits just got larger.
Krugman never understood mercantilism. In 1997, he incorrectly argued that if we buy Chinese products, they would have to buy American products. But our growing trade deficit with China ever since has proved him wrong.
In his international economics textbook, he argued, citing Hume, that mercantilism cannot continue over a long-term. But Hume was wrong. If the goal of the gold mercantilists were to build their industry (not their gold hoard), they could have practiced the same system that the dollar mercantilists practice today by using the gold obtained from trade to buy assets in the trade deficit country.
It is a shame that his prize comes just when his biggest failure is becoming evident. The American consumer could not keep borrowing more and more from the mercantilist countries forever. Eventually there had to be a pull-back. Now that pull-back is occurring with a vengeance.
Howard Richman
http://www.tradeandtaxes.blogspot.com
DC: The criteria to be nominated for the Nobel prize appears to include disparaging the Asian system of governance, and support of Clinton Administration’s Neo-liberalism political agenda.
Krugman’s point in the 1990’s was that there was no magical Asian economic model, and that Asian growth in the 1970’s and 1980’s was due to moving people from farm to factory. He turned out to be right. He’s been making the same points about the US economy for the last eight years and he also turns out to be right.
If you apply Krugman’s analysis to China, then things will look good for the next generation as people move from low productivity agriculture to higher productivity manufacturing and services. The fact that China is in this situation means that people who are predicting the imminent collapse of the Chinese economy are likely to be wrong. The hard part will be around 2030-2040 when that burst of growth taps out.
Now you’ve gone and done it moldbug. At the risk of exploding your cranium, I should point out the work of a geologist perpetually tilting at a ten year old paper whose findings, while only ancillary to the theory of anthropogenic global warming in the first place, have been upheld in subsequent work (and cited in the most recent IPCC), don’t constitute what I would consider to be a threat to my belief system, even if I was like you and held one that wasn’t evidence based. That is without pointing out his more recent fraudulent critique of Hansen, wherein the mask slipped, or his featuring posts from an individual who has shown himself to be ignorant, for example, of the difference between weather and climate in my own interactions with him.
What’s that? You didn’t know that the former mining executive’s ‘work’ doesn’t bear on the fundamental body of evidence that constitutes the theory of AGW? Well… at least that little bit of ignoramus won’t be wanting for company in there.
I hope for your sake Drudge is no more than a mouse click away.
Dear Marzipan,
I see you’re the kind of person who likes to evaluate both sides of an argument yourself before making up your mind. I certainly respect your perspective, which strikes me as honest, original, and well-reasoned. Perhaps we could agree to disagree on this important, but tangential, question?
I don’t understand why seemingly rational people insist on arguing with the brainwashed. Do you try and deprogram Moonies as they thrust flowers on you in the Airport? I just ignore them and keep walking.
Though I must admit, I am curious. DJC are you the David Chang I knew back in college? The one who famously argued that the Tienanmen Square protesters wrestled the guns away from the soldiers and shot themselves to embarrass the Chinese government? You sure sound like him. If so I’m happy to see you haven’t lost touch with that charmingly idiosyncratic version of reality that made you such a popular topic of conversation.
here’s the pbp as i see it…
1) moldbug with vague allegation* (w/link!) presumably to cast arms-length doubt** on climate science ‘orthodoxy’
2) majorajam counters with too specific a brush, painting DC and moldbug as neocons, altho larger point — get w/ the reality-based program folks — stands (’reality-based’ in scare quotes depending on your persuasion
3) moldbug rebuts w/ an RPG i played in my cousins’ basement once??? [loosely based on RAW & shea's illuminatus trilogy, iirc?]
4) majorajam brings the scorched earth promethean fire of empiricism…
3) moldbug name-calls but relents w/ rodney king acquiescence…
so i’ll score this one: moldbug pwnd!
—
* cf. http://www.reason.com/news/show/118479.html – former AGW denier/skeptic; myself, i can kinda respect the fuck it let the ice caps melt, life will adapt (or not), buy some real estate in greenland crowd… well hell, i guess i’ll also admit a certain fondness for dogged axe-grinders, because sometimes their planes of existence intersect pretty entertainingly (and sometimes illuminatingly) with the rest of ours — it’s nice to know those orthogonal dimensions are out there
** http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/us/politics/13martin.html