Monday, October 13, 2008

Yea, team! Krugman wins...

AS AN economics-challenged  regular reader of Paul Krugman's column in the New York Times,  let  me offer my enthusiastic congratulations to him for his Nobel Prize.  For the years of the Bush presidency,  he has been the Paul Revere of impending economic meltdowns in subprime mortgages,  warning  often of the dark fate of housing bubbles.  One of his major targets was Alan Greenspan, the self-accommodating former Federal Reserve chief who flattered Bush economics  by supporting the unchecked mortgage industry's  reckless policies that brought down the market to disastrous depths.  (To this day, Greenspan has yet to concede that he made any judgmental errors as the Bush administration's go-to guru and continues to live quite well, thank you. ) During those same years Krugman, a Princeton economics professor, was considered by many trickle-down conservatives to be nothing more  than an Ivy League nuisance, a liberal campus type navigating blindly in matters best left to the deep thinkers on Wall Street and at Greenspan's personal fiefdom at the Federal Reserve.  These days I have begun to wonder whether we would have ever reached this crises if Krugman had been the head of the Federal Reserve or the Treasury Secretary.  Well, what if...?  
 

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