Does He Pass the Test? by Paul Krugman | The New York Review of Books: ".... the victory over financial crisis looks awfully Pyrrhic. Before the crisis, most analysts expected the US economy to keep growing at around 2.5 percent per year; in fact it has barely managed 1 percent, so that our annual national income at this point is around $1.7 trillion less than expected. Headline unemployment is down, but that’s largely because many workers, despairing of ever finding a job, have stopped looking. Median family income is still far below its pre-crisis level. And there’s a growing consensus among economists that much of the damage to the economy is permanent, that we’ll never get back to our old path of growth... Whatever Geithner may say, it’s clear that a lot more could also have been done to reduce the burden of mortgage debt. Yet we didn’t do what needed to be done... We can argue about how much of the blame rests with the Obama team... But the overall grade seems clear. We didn’t pass the test—we failed, badly."
Friday, July 25, 2014
Financial Crisis, Tim Geithner, Barack Obama, Congress - Paul Krugman: "we failed, badly"
Forget the book -- read the review (excerpt below):
Does He Pass the Test? by Paul Krugman | The New York Review of Books: ".... the victory over financial crisis looks awfully Pyrrhic. Before the crisis, most analysts expected the US economy to keep growing at around 2.5 percent per year; in fact it has barely managed 1 percent, so that our annual national income at this point is around $1.7 trillion less than expected. Headline unemployment is down, but that’s largely because many workers, despairing of ever finding a job, have stopped looking. Median family income is still far below its pre-crisis level. And there’s a growing consensus among economists that much of the damage to the economy is permanent, that we’ll never get back to our old path of growth... Whatever Geithner may say, it’s clear that a lot more could also have been done to reduce the burden of mortgage debt. Yet we didn’t do what needed to be done... We can argue about how much of the blame rests with the Obama team... But the overall grade seems clear. We didn’t pass the test—we failed, badly."
Does He Pass the Test? by Paul Krugman | The New York Review of Books: ".... the victory over financial crisis looks awfully Pyrrhic. Before the crisis, most analysts expected the US economy to keep growing at around 2.5 percent per year; in fact it has barely managed 1 percent, so that our annual national income at this point is around $1.7 trillion less than expected. Headline unemployment is down, but that’s largely because many workers, despairing of ever finding a job, have stopped looking. Median family income is still far below its pre-crisis level. And there’s a growing consensus among economists that much of the damage to the economy is permanent, that we’ll never get back to our old path of growth... Whatever Geithner may say, it’s clear that a lot more could also have been done to reduce the burden of mortgage debt. Yet we didn’t do what needed to be done... We can argue about how much of the blame rests with the Obama team... But the overall grade seems clear. We didn’t pass the test—we failed, badly."
