Bonus Thursday Idiocy Department: Clive Crook Misreports Larry Summers
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
When Larry Summers said::
Even a great bubble [first in high-tech and then in housing] wasn’t enough to produce any excess of aggregate demand.... Even with artificial stimulus to demand, coming from all this financial imprudence, you wouldn’t see any excess...
He wasn't calling for more bubbles. He was pointing out that an economy that can only attain anything like full employment with stable inflation in a bubble is an economy with something deeply and structurally wrong with it--something that needs to be fixed.
Thus when Clive Crook wrote "No, Larry Summers, We Don’t Need More Bubbles" he was either too dishonest to report straight what Summers meant or too stupid to follow the thread of the speech.
There's a moral responsibility here: either raise your game and don't be stupid, or play your hand honestly.