Brad DeLong

Alas, My "Foreign Affairs" Review of Alan Blinder's Superb "After the Music Stopped" is a "Premium Article"...

Sorry, guys and dolls…

I will let it out from behind the paywall when I am allowed to…

J. Bradford DeLong: The Second Great Depression: Why the Economic Crisis Is Worse Than You Think:

Alan Blinder is only the most recent in a series of prominent economists who have produced analytic accounts of the U.S. economic downturn. His crisp narrative lays out the policy options that were available at each stage of the crisis, and his analysis is infused with a deep understanding of macroeconomics. Overall, it is the best general volume on the subject that has been published to date.

Newly-Minted Berkeley Ph.D. Energy-Environment Economist Catherine Almirall and Macro-History Economist Joshua Kautsky Hausman Set Off for Ann Arbor

• Catherine Almirall Hausman
• Joshua Kautsky Hausman

We confidently expect very good things from them…

Of course, if they get tenure votes in 2020, that means that their outside tenure letters will be written in 2019, and based on discussions outside faculty members will have had in 2018, which will depend on papers read in 2017, which depend on papers published in 2016, which depend on papers submitted to journals in 2015.

Which means that they have two years to do the work to get themselves tenure in Ann Arbor…

In Which Paul Krugman Is 5583 Miles Away, Eating a Moveable Feast: Geographic, Architectural, and Intellectual…

Paul Krugman: How Are These Times Different?:

Ah, Paris! You walk for miles and miles — it’s still, after all these years, a spectacularly beautiful city. Then you have as traditional a meal as possible at an old-fashioned bistro, washed down with lots of wine. And you feel like hell the next morning….

[W]hen it comes to macro issues I am pretty much a curmudgeon, someone who thinks that the similarities between our time and the 90s in Japan or the 30s everywhere are a lot more important than the differences…

Yes, definitely. That is the principal lesson right now!

In Which the Thoughtful and Intelligent Sam Wilkinson Smacks Down the Odious James Taranto of the Despicable Wall Street Journal, Saying: "Be a Man!"

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Sam Wilkinson: James Taranto, Louis C.K., and The Brand New "War On Men":

James Taranto is angry. Lt. General Susan Helms has had her promotion held up by Missouri’s recently re-elected Senator Claire McCaskill. Taranto doesn’t like this; he views it as a salvo in what he’s describing as a “War On Men.”…

Brian Stops by to Say: "Berkeley Political Economy Majors Need to Read Not Less But More Hegel!"

John Cochrane: "What Chicago Does 'Know' Is Scholarship… We Take a Little Time to Research What People Actually Have to Say Before Calling Them… Less than 'Half-Intelligent' [like] DeLong [Does]…"

Reading Paul Krugman calls to mind that I never reacted to John Cochrane's July 2012 failure to mark his beliefs to market and, instead, doubling down on his claim that the biggest risk the U.S. economy faces is that of becoming "Argentina" "quickly".

I must say that if I had been opining stridently about issues of public policy without doing my homework five years ago, and if between then and now events had developed in directions strongly contrary to my expectations, I would not double down on what I had thought then--I would rather try hard to do my homework and to mark my beliefs to market.

And if I were going to criticize people for not citing my work, I would not claim that a sentence they wrote which comes immediately after a four-paragraph quote from me as an example, and I would have read their explanation of why they think expansionary fiscal policy right now does not raise the risks of "fiscal dominance" rather than remain in ignorance of it.

But to each his own.

Cochrane:

The Grumpy Economist: Krugman, Delong and Inflation: Yes, I've been worried for some time that our current debt could lead to inflation. And yes, that inflation has so far not happened…. Well, they made fun of Friedman when he said in 1968 that inflation was coming. They made fun of Greenspan when he said in 1996 that stocks seemed awfully high, and stocks went up for a few more years.

I gotta interrupt: Friedman in the late 1960s was right. He--correctly--saw inflation rising because he had theory and evidence on supply and demand in the labor market. But Greenspan in 1996 was wrong: since late 1996 the S&P 500 has produced a real return of 5.6%/year.

Does Cochrane know this?

Has he looked at the numbers?

Back in 1996 I agreed with Greenspan. I worried too that the market was overvalued. We thought this for a bunch of reasons. We were wrong.

Why does the fact that our worries were wrong then make Cochrane's worries right now?

Liveblogging World War II: June 19, 1943

World War II Today:

On the 19th June 1943 the Governor of what remained of Poland, Hans Frank, met with Hitler to discuss the situation in the country. He brought with him a briefing document which was to prove important at the post war War Crimes trials. There was ample evidence of the suffering that the Nazis had brought to the whole of the Polish population. Quite apart from the murderous actions directed against the Jewish population, non Jewish Poles had suffered from an extraordinarily repressive regime. Frank himself had openly acknowledged as much in a 1940 interview:

Hoisted from the Archives from a Year Ago: John Cochrane Claims the U.S. Is at Risk of Becoming "Argentina": Noah Smith: Noah Bravely Takes the Cochrane-Argentina Side of the Bet…

UPDATE (June 2013): We now have two years to run. If Noah wants to back out of his position, I will buy it back from him at 99.9 cents on the dollar. At this point I think that core inflation above 5% with unemployment above 6% starting in a year really is a 1000-1 shot, even with fat tails.

---

A 5%/year inflation rate is not "Argentina", but we want to bend over backward to give the John Cochrane side a chance…

The bet, made in July 2012:

If, at any time between 7/28/2012 and 7/28/2015, core consumer prices, as recorded in the FRED database series CPILFESL, are up more than 5% in the preceding 12 months, and if over the same 1-year period monthly U3 unemployment (as recorded in FRED database series UNRATE) has not averaged below 6%, then Brad DeLong agrees to buy Noah Smith one dinner at Zachary's Pizza at 1853 Solano Ave. in Berkeley CA, and to pay Noah 49 times the cost--including tax but excluding tip--of Noah's meal at Zachary's in Federal Reserve notes, or in alternative means of payment accepted by Zachary's should Zachary's Pizza no longer be accepting Federal Reserve notes at the date of the dinner. This cost will be assessed as the total cost of the dinner to all, divided by the number of people present, regardless of how much pizza is consumed by or how much alcohol is drunk by specific individuals.

Ann Marie Marciarille Forecasts the Medicaid Expansion Landscape: Missouri River Blogging

From a year ago, on July 2, 2012, starting at 67:33 into the video, UMKC Health Law Professor provides a spot-on forecast of nearly everything that has happened across the country in Medicaid expansion decisions over the past year:

Noted for June 19, 2013

• Jesse Rothstein: Unemployment Insurance and Disability Insurance in the Great Recession: "Disability insurance applications and awards are countercyclical. One possible explanation is that unemployed individuals who exhaust their Unemployment Insurance benefits use DI as a form of extended benefits. I exploit the haphazard pattern of Unemployment Insurance (UI) extensions in the Great Recession to identify the effect of UI exhaustion on DI application, using both aggregate data at the state-month level and microdata on unemployed individuals in the Current Population Survey. I find no indication that expiration of UI benefits causes DI applications. Estimates are sufficiently precise to rule out effects of meaningful magnitude."

Claire McCaskill on the Sexual Assault Problem in the Military: Missouri River Blogging

CBS News:

McCaskill: "Military Doesn't Even Know How Many Rapes and Sodomies" Occur: WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), argued the problem underlying military sexual assault crimes is not the role of the chain of command, as many have argued, but the broad definition of "sexual contact." She is among Democrats and activists upset with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel's and Senate Armed Services chairman Sen. Carl Levin's support to soften the legislation aimed at addressing the problem…. Sen. McCaskill said at the Senate Armed Services Committee markup Wednesday:

Our main problem is the military doesn't even know how many rapes and sodomies they have…. What a better place to be a roving predator than the military that moves you all the time. Don't think this is over once this… becomes law because we have just begun…"

Mammal Nate Silver vs. the Journamalistic Dinosaurs

Nate Silver: Politico Co-Founders Lack 'Curiosity For The World Outside Of The Bubble':

I thought it was a good interview. It's striking how preoccupied Harris and VandeHei are with the perception that Politico is too "insidery". My personal critique of their work cuts a little deeper than that, however. It's not that they are too "insidery" per se, but that the perceptions of Beltway insiders, which Politico echoes and embraces, are not always very insightful or accurate. In other words, the conventional wisdom is often wrong, especially in Washington.

Liveblogging World War II: June 18, 1943

Petr Mikhin on the Eastern Front:

We had completely given up on the appearance of the German cooks, when suddenly above us we heard the clink of empty jerrycans. What a joy — they were coming! Then worry: how would everything turn out? We had planned to capture them at dawn, when everyone was still asleep, but here we were now in the afternoon and all the Germans were up and about, while our guys on the opposite bank likely weren’t waiting for us, expecting that we had postponed the operation until nightfall.

Mary Beard Reviews Claire Holleran's "Shopping in Ancient Rome: Tuesday Hoisted from the Non-Internet from 2000 Years Ago

Mary Beard:

Mary Beard reviews ‘Shopping in Ancient Rome’ by Claire Holleran: The most memorable account of an ancient shopping expedition is found in some comic verses by the third-century BC poet Herodas, who lived in Alexandria, by far the smartest city in the Western world at the time. In his poem a woman called Metro and a couple of her friends visit a shoe shop owned by one Kerdon (‘Mr Profiteer’). As soon as they arrive, slaves bring a bench for the ladies to sit on, while Kerdon tries to interest them in his wares with a pushy sales pitch that mixes extravagant claims for the styles, workmanship and glorious colours of the shoes, with what sounds like a well practised hard-luck story lamenting his life of unremitting toil and all the mouths he has to feed. Eventually every variety of shoe in the shop is brought out – Sikyonians, slippers, boots, Argive sandals, scarlets, flats – before the ladies start haggling about prices and thinking about the footwear they are going to need for an upcoming festival.

Noted for June 18, 2013

• Ken Rogoff: Dornbusch's Overshooting Model After Twenty-Five Years, The Mundell-Fleming Lecture: "Now underlying Dornbusch's disarmingly simple result lies some truly radical thinking. At the time Rudi was working on his paper, the concept of sticky prices was under severe attack. In his elegant formalization of the Phelps islands model, Lucas (1973) suggested that one could understand the real effects of monetary policy without any appeal to Keynesian nominal rigidities, and by 1975, Lucas had many influential followers in Sargent, Barro and others. The Chicago-Minnesota School maintained that sticky prices were nonsense and continued to advance this view for at least another fifteen years. It was the dominant view in academic macroeconomics. Certainly, there was a long period in which the assumption of sticky prices was a recipe for instant rejection at many leading journals. Despite the religious conviction among macroeconomic theorists that prices cannot be sticky, the Dornbusch model remained compelling to most practical international macroeconomists. This divergence of views led to a long rift between macroeconomics and much of mainstream international finance. Of course, today, the pendulum has swung back entirely, and there is a broad consensus across schools of thought that some form of price rigidity is absolutely necessary to explain real-world data, in either closed or open economies. The new view can be found in many places, but certainly in the closed economy work of authors such as Rotemberg and Woodford (1997), Woodford (2002), and of course in New Open Economy Macroeconomics. The Phelps-Lucas islands paradigm for monetary policy is, for now, a footnote (albeit a very clever one) in the history of monetary theory."

Liveblogging World War ii: June 17, 1943

FDR's secretary of war stifles Truman's inquiry into suspicious defense plant:

On this day in 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's secretary of war, Harry Stimson, phones then-Missouri Senator Harry S. Truman and politely asks him not to make inquiries about a defense plant in Pasco, Washington.

World War II was in full swing in 1943 and Truman was chairing a Senate committee on possible war profiteering committed by American defense plants. In the process of investigating war-production expenditures, Truman stumbled upon a suspicious plant in the state of Washington and asked the plant managers to testify in front of the committee. Unbeknownst to Truman, this particular plant was secretly connected with a program to develop an atomic bomb—"the Manhattan Project." When Stimson, one of a handful of people who knew about the highly classified Manhattan Project, heard about Truman's line of questioning, he immediately acted to prevent the Missouri senator from blowing the biggest military secret in world history.

Monday DeLong-Being-Stupid Self-Smackdown Watch: Expansionary Fiscalists vs. Expansionary Monetarists and the Federal Reserve's Shift from a Time- to a State-Based Policy Rule: Will It End Our "Lost Decade"?

The Federal Reserve's announcement last December that it was switching from a time- to a state-based policy rule has not REPEAT NOT raised expectations of inflation over the next five, ten, or thirty years. Perhaps this is because Federal Reserve communicators have spent a lot of time telling people that the shift does not mean that the Federal Reserve will tolerate higher inflation. Perhaps it is for other reasons.

This is a powerful empirical piece of evidence that it is much harder to summon the Inflation Expectations Imp than economists like Greg Mankiw had thought. It is a point for the expansionary fiscalists in their debate with the expansionary monetarists.

And it is a smackdown of me for my fit of enthusiastic expansionary monetarism last December, when I wrote: Brad DeLong: The Federal Reserve's Shift from a Time- to a State-Based Policy Rule: Will It End Our "Lost Decade"?.

Here's what I wrote last December:

Noted for June 17, 2103

• Paul Krugman: Taylor's Rule on Fiscal Policy: "I just happened to run across John Taylor’s latest… Taylor now says that we should not cite falling spending by state and local governments as a reason for the weak recovery. Why? Because, he says, such spending is endogenous: state and local governments cut spending in line with revenue. Basically, they’re cash constrained; so what can you expect? But wait: Taylor has prominently argued (pdf) that the Obama stimulus… part that involved aid to state and local governments, was ineffective, because the state and local governments just used the money to pay down debt — that is, giving them more cash wouldn’t have mattered. I’m sure that Taylor will come up with some reason these statements aren’t diametrically opposed. But from here it looks like the Taylor rule on fiscal policy is that Obama is always wrong, and that state and local governments are either cash-constrained or not cash-constrained, depending on which assertion is needed to back up that position."

Joe Gagnon: Saving Abenomics

Joe Gagnon is right: there is no (good) alternative to Abenomics:

Saving Abenomics: No Time for Cold Feet on QE: Prime Minister Shinzo Abe captured the attention of economists, pundits, and global markets with his bold plans to boost growth and inflation in Japan. Stock prices soared, real bond yields plummeted, and the yen dropped sharply. These trends boded well for Abe’s success. More recently, markets seem disappointed with the details (or lack thereof) on Abe’s structural reforms and the unwillingness of the Bank of Japan (BOJ) to implement its quantitative easing (QE) plans flexibly. In this post I focus on what the BOJ should do to achieve its inflation goal and how that will help reduce the long-run burden of Japan’s large national debt.

Liveblogging World War II: June 16, 1943

Noted for June 16, 2013

• Aaron Carroll: The sky didn’t fall before, and it won’t fall now: "One of the things I’m fascinated by is the way history repeats itself when it comes to health care reform. Everyone acts as if what we’re doing is crazy new, as if it’s never been done before. This kind of thinking was the subject of one of my favorite Huffington Post columns (which I encourage you to go enjoy). I think we’re seeing the same thing again with respect to Medicaid and the ACA. Many of the claims about the expansion’s imminent failure involve arguments that aren’t new. In fact, they were the same as those being employed against traditional Medicaid decades ago. So I had awesome college student TIE-assistant Jaskaran Bains look up media coverage of Medicaid when it was passed. See if any of it sounds familiar."

Rick Santorum: Why Mitt Romney Didn’t Win

Rick Santorum gives a good speech:

Rick Santorum: Why Mitt Romney didn’t win: One after another, [the speakers the Romney Campaign highlighted at the convention] talked about the business they had built. But not a single—not a single —factory worker went out there. Not a single janitor, waitress or person who worked in that company! We didn’t care about them. You know what? They built that company too! And we should have had them on that stage….

Liveblogging World War II: June 15, 1943

The "Blobel Commando" begins its cover-up of atrocities:

On this day in 1943, Paul Blobel, an SS colonel, is given the assignment of coordinating the destruction of the evidence of the grossest of Nazi atrocities, the systematic extermination of European Jews.

Noted for June 15, 2013

• Bob Rob Reich: Much Ado About MOOCs: "Sandel is legendary lecturer, and Justice is rightly one of the most celebrated courses at Harvard…. And yet the San Jose State philosophers are right about the poor quality of JusticeX. It is almost certainly inferior to what the SJSU faculty could offer its students. How can this be?… I signed up for JusticeX with interest and went through most of the course content…. JusticeX is dispiritingly uninventive, seemingly disinterested in experimenting with any of the novel forms of faculty-student and student-student interaction that many online platforms, including edX, make possible…. In creating JusticeX, Sandel chose to do nothing more than upload the PBS video recordings…. No attempt was made to create supplementary materials designed specifically for online learning…. No attempt was made to curate a robust and interactive student discussion forum; instead online discussions consist of hundreds one or two sentence posts by students with scarcely any replies by Sandel, his teaching assistants, or other students. No attempt was made to foster student learning through digital projects, essay assignments, or the kind of written assessment or section discussions that Harvard students experience…. Sandel appeared once, live, to answer questions from JusticeX students. Otherwise, he might not have had any involvement at all. When the San Jose State philosophers… observe that 'purchasing a series of lectures does not provide anything over and above assigning a book to read', they are also correct. What this demonstrates, however, is not the inferiority of MOOCs but a lack of imagination in the case of JusticeX…. The cliché that 'more research is needed' is actually true about MOOCs."

Tweetweek: June 14, 2013

Get (much) smarter about labor's history and future by reading this terrific piece by @yeselson: http://t.co/j3ifzfPSxP

— Rebecca Traister (@rtraister) June 14, 2013

#IMF denounces #US fiscal policy http://t.co/Lanri5qXGO #FT "Go slow but hurry up"; well put @Lagarde #economics @cdaude @HrReisen @delong

— Jean-Philippe Stijns (@jpstijns) June 14, 2013

@Pawelmorski The endnotes for the later chapters also really interesting, fwiw. Long discussion of Gorton.

— Matthew C. Klein (@Matthew_C_Klein) June 14, 2013

Friday Night Non-Music

Liveblogging World War II: June 14, 1943

FDR's Calendar:

Do Tom Friedman and David Brooks All by Themselves Make the New York Times Op-Ed Page a Value-Subtracting Proposition--One That We Would Be Better Off Without?

Dan Drezner makes the case with respect to Tom Friedman:

Man, the State and trust: Thomas Friedman captures the sentiments of a lot of the foreign policy community with today's column.  This passage in particular pretty much sums it up: 

Yes, I worry about potential government abuse of privacy from a program designed to prevent another 9/11 — abuse that, so far, does not appear to have happened. But I worry even more about another 9/11…. If there is one more 9/11 — or worse, an attack involving nuclear material — it could lead to the end of the open society as we know it. If there were another 9/11, I fear that 99 percent of Americans would tell their members of Congress: “Do whatever you need to do to, privacy be damned, just make sure this does not happen again.”… That is why I’ll reluctantly, very reluctantly, trade off the government using data mining to look for suspicious patterns in phone numbers called and e-mail addresses — and then have to go to a judge to get a warrant to actually look at the content under guidelines set by Congress — to prevent a day where, out of fear, we give government a license to look at anyone, any e-mail, any phone call, anywhere, anytime….

Friedman's… at least he's straightforward…. That said, here's what I worry about:

Noted for June 14, 2013

• David Glasner: Markets in Confusion: "It wasn’t so long ago that we were being told by opponents of stimulus programs that the stimulus programs, whether fiscal or monetary, were counterproductive, because 'the markets need certainty'. Well, maybe the certainty that is needed is the certainty that the stimulus won’t be withdrawn before it has done its job."

NIno Scalia and Justified True Belief: A Puzzle

Elon James White watches Nino Scalia confess that he is unable to believe in molecular biology:

Justice Scalia: Not Down with Science: Justice Scalia’s concurrence in the case on patenting genetic material, Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., definitely stood out. Apparently, Scalia doesn’t believe in the science behind the case.

In Which I Feel Sorry for Ramesh Ponnuru…

Kevin Drum:

Republicans Really, Really Don't Care About Improving Healthcare: Ramesh Ponnuru argues today that Republicans are foolish for hanging their hats on the likelihood that Obamacare will die a fiery death in 2014…. [He says] Republicans need to get busy now coming up with a replacement healthcare plan….

Congressional Republicans have not reached agreement on what should replace Obamacare, let alone a strategy for enacting that replacement. The best option for replacing Obamacare would be a plan that made it possible for almost everyone in the country to purchase catastrophic insurance (and possible for most people to buy insurance that goes beyond catastrophic coverage) by removing the obstacles that government policy puts in the way of that goal. A plan to do that would involve six key steps…

Health Care Reform: Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona Persuades Enough Republican Legislators to Do the Right Thing on Medicaid Expansion

Mary K. Reinhart, Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, Alia Beard Rau and Mary Jo Pitzl:

Arizona House approves Medicaid expansion, $8.8 billion budget: Five months after Gov. Jan Brewer vowed to expand Medicaid, a bipartisan Arizona House coalition voted early today to approve her high-stakes proposal, along with a budget that gives significant new funding to education and child welfare. The mostly 33-27 votes followed nine hours of debate and vitriolic speeches by conservative Republicans, who lashed out at fellow GOP members and Brewer for teaming with Democrats to steamroll them to approve a key piece of the federal health-care overhaul and the governor's top legislative priority….

Dear Mr Carney... Memos to the New Bank of England Governor

Dear Mr Carney…:

Wage settlements are subdued, and more than 2.5 million people are out of work in the UK: thus the top priority for the Bank of England has to be to boost aggregate demand.

With possibilities for expanded government spending blocked by the ideological fundamentalism of the parliamentary majority, the interest rates the Bank of England controls at rock-bottom, and quantitative easing of unknown effectiveness, only one obvious lever remains: the exchange rate.

It is time for the governor to announce that a (somewhat) weaker pound is in Britain’s (short-run) interest--and to make it so.

The Properly-Formulated Bagehot Rule Has Four Parts

The properly-formulated Bagehot Rule is that in a financial crisis, the lender-of-last-resort:

1. Lends freely,
2. At a penalty rate,
3. On collateral that is good in normal times, and
4. Institutions that are still underwater get "resolved" immediately and completely.

That was not done in Greece in 2010.

Liveblogging World War II: June 13, 1943

Underrated Economics Weblogger: Evan Soltas: Thursday Link Promiscuity Weblogging

http://esoltas.blogspot.com/

And:

The U.S. Economy Still Isn't Churning: "My Bloomberg View colleague Matthew Klein just weighed in… saying that the rise in the number of people quitting is a good thing. He's right: Quits show the employee's confidence that he or she can find a better job. There's a counterpoint, though. The rate of labor market 'churn' -- the number of people moving from job to job per quarter -- dropped by 2.3 million during the recession and hasn't recovered…. Low churn means that people may be choosing to hold down jobs that aren't quite right for them…. 8.7 million Americans found a job or left one in April -- down 2 million from pre-recession levels… weak demand for labor… clogs up the cycle of job openings, hires, fires and quits. You have to be brave to leave a job amid high unemployment and little hiring -- but with few quitters, positions don't open up and so the low churn persists…. The Fed is watching the unemployment rate, but its statements indicate it also considers 'additional measures of labor market conditions'. Churn should be one of those. The ultimate task of labor markets is to allocate workers to positions -- and churn measures that directly. That it hasn't improved since the recession means that labor markets are much less healthy than falling unemployment might suggest:

Noted for June 13, 2013

Dani Rodrik: Europe’s Way Out | Erik Loomis: Lead and Schizophrenia | Bruce Bartlett: 'Financialization' as a Cause of Economic Malaise | Mark Thoma sends us to David Ricardo 'On Machinery' | J.P. Koning: Moneyness: Adam Smith's very own Lehman Crisis | Teresa Nielsen Hayden (2004): New times call for new t-shirts | Austin Frakt: The longest ever study of consumer-directed health plans | The Battle of Maldon | Josh Barro: Was Edward Snowden A Good Leaker? |

• Whack-a-Molonomics Blogging: Hey! Paul! "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað" (Apropos of Paul Krugman: Hamster-Wheel Economics: "Sad reading from British economic analysts these days — sad, that is, for anyone who likes to believe that evidence actually matters for policy. First, the normally even-tempered Simon Wren-Lewis is angry, with cause: he sees the Dutch central bank calling for more austerity despite the depressed state of the Dutch economy, no prospect of recovery any time soon, no hint of debt trouble — and no explanation except boilerplate…. It was one thing to buy into the austerity thing three years ago… but to roll out the same old line given everything that has happened since is pretty disgraceful…. Martin Wolf is out today with a column explaining that there is no current risk of inflation. He’s right, of course, and presumably what he hears from policymakers and others tells him that such a column is necessary. But my God: we had this debate in full four years ago. The usual suspects issued dire inflation warnings; the Keynesian/liquidity trap types like me insisted that this was all wrong given current circumstances. The events unfolded…. And yet the people warning about inflation four years ago, and three years ago, and two years ago, are still at it, still making the same arguments. And they still have influence! I guess there’s nothing for it but to keep on pounding. But it’s discouraging.").