Krugman&co

So, for a while there during the campaign it seemed very iffy. But in the end, discipline and being on the right side of the issues prevailed. Yes, Elizabeth Warren won! Oh, and that guy, Barack Obama, too.

Noah Smith, who is a better hu¬man being than I am, recently wad¬ed through an anti-Krugman rant to find an interesting nugget: the claim that money is a bubble.

Nate Silver — whom everyone in¬terested in the American presiden¬tial election should be reading — re¬cently wrote on his FiveThirtyEight blog for The New York Times about being bemused by Intrade’s analy¬sis, which is showing a much higher chance of a Mitt Romney victory than his does.

I’ve been thinking in odd moments about my professional state of my mind and thought I’d share a bit.

Back in 2009, when there was (briefly) a policy consensus in favor of active fiscal policy to fight the economic slump, there were many warnings to the effect that we must not repeat the infamous mistake of 1937, in which President Franklin D. Roosevelt was persuaded to focus on balancing the budget while the economy was still weak, terminating the recovery and sending the United States into the second leg of the Great Depression. And what policy makers proceeded to do was, of course, to repeat the mistake of 1937.

Mitt Romney is catching a lot of flak from his own side lately, which seems premature; this is by no means over. But let me say that even if