Paul Krugman
Paul Krugman
Paul Robin Krugman is an American economist, Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and an op-ed columnist for The New York Times. In 2008, Krugman was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to New Trade Theory and New Economic Geography. The Prize Committee cited Krugman's work explaining the patterns of international trade and the geographic distribution of economic activity, by examining the effects of economies of...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth28 February 1953
CityAlbany, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Can we break the machine that is imposing right-wing radicalism on the United States? The scariest part is that the media is part of that machine.
[I]f one asks what substantive contributions [F. A. Hayek] made to our understanding of how the world works, one is left at something of a loss. Were it not for his politics, he would be virtually forgotten.
The United States in particular and the West in general should be feeling a little embarrassed about all that lecturing we did to the Third World.
The key reason executives are paid so much now is that they appoint the members of the corporate board that determines their compensation and control many of the perks that board members count on. So it's not the invisible hand of the market that leads to those monumental executive incomes; it's the invisible handshake in the boardroom.
[The US] budget is dominated by the retirement programs, Social Security and Medicare - loosely speaking, the post-cold-war federal government is a big pension fund that also happens to have an army.
You really have to go searching desperately to find any contemporary examples of good, old-fashioned runaway inflation.
People who are complaining about the Fed are people who've been predicting runaway inflation for five and six years, and it hasn't happened.
What the Depression teaches us is that when the economy is so depressed that even a zero interest rate isn't low enough, you have to put conventional notions of prudence and sound policy aside.
Tax cuts were not going to be effective at creating jobs, and the job creation record is lousy.
I'm especially baffled by the idea of taking insurance against a U.S. default. If America defaults, we're talking about a chaotic world - Mad Max, more or less - in which case, who imagines that insurance claims will be honored?
It's a funny thing, by the way, how people who love free markets are also quite sure that they know that investors are being irrational.
There's one thing that the Fed has been really good at cracking down on, and that's inflation.
I think if you're a liberal, you believe that we all are, at least to some extent, our brothers' keepers, you really believe that we have a sumptuary responsibility to make sure that life is decent for everybody in America, that you believe that society out to be broadly shared, and you believe that you can't have a real democracy unless you have a little bit, at least, of economic democracy.
When the Fed decides that inflation is too high, they have the tools, and they've shown historically that they have the will, to bring it down. And, it might be painful.