A very clear and informative column in Friday’s New York Times from Paul Krugman. It explains in the briefest terms how we got here and the need for immediate action.
2 thoughts on “Moment of Truth”
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A very clear and informative column in Friday’s New York Times from Paul Krugman. It explains in the briefest terms how we got here and the need for immediate action.
Comments are closed.
Every discussion I have seen of this situation has started shortly before the sub-prime meltdown.
Have we not spent the last 20 years propping up our economy with artificial stimulation? Can you use artificial stimulation endlessly without ever letting the market reset?
The invention of the 401k for instance; not good or bad, but suddenly Wall Street is standing in front of an endless fire hose of investment money. Not a bubble or a bucket, but an endless stream monthly. It has to go somewhere, money can’t be let lay around. So it has to be pushed into the stock and bond market. And pushed again next month, and the month after. Would this not tend to inflate valuations of stocks? In ’99 the market said it did. And crashed.
How many other examples of the same thing can you come up with in the last 20 years?
How about artificially holding energy costs down for decades?
Emmett
Imagine if Bush & his Republican cronies had successfully privatized Social Security a few years ago.