Paul Krugman: Fact-Checking Financial Recessions:
[Alan] Taylor… and [Morris] Schularick… confirm Ken Rogoff’s dictum that we’re suffering from a “garden-variety severe financial crisis”…. This should not be taken as a reason to believe that we couldn’t and shouldn’t be doing better; experience in this crisis has been overwhelmingly supportive of a Keynesian view in which the problem is inadequate demand, and in which fiscal policy (with an assist from unconventional monetary policy) could have greatly ameliorated the pain. But there’s nothing to suggest that the policies of the Obama administration have made it worse; on the contrary, they’ve almost surely made it less bad than it might have been. And of course I had all this information in hand when Mary Matalin tried to tell me, out of her deep knowledge of economic history, that this is the worst ever.
