Paul Krugman
...instead it seems that business - like weight loss - is a subject wherein hope and fear inspire limitless gullibility.Collection: Fear
When stock prices are rising, it's called ''momentum investing''; when they are falling, it's called ''panic.''Collection: Fall
It has been obvious all along, to anyone paying attention, that the politicians shouting loudest about deficits are actually using deficit hysteria as a cover story for their real agenda, which is top-down class warfare. To put it in Romneyesque terms, it's all about finding an excuse to slash programs that help people who like to watch Nascar events, even while lavishing tax cuts on people who like to own Nascar teams.Collection: Real
If you can create even the illusion of high profitability for a few years, then when the thing collapses you can walk out of the wreckage a very rich man.Collection: Men
Obama is very much an establishment sort of guy. The whole image of him as a transcendent figure was based on style rather than substance. If you actually looked at what he said, not how he said it, he said very establishment things. He's a moderate, cautious, ameliorative guy. He tends to gravitate toward Beltway conventional wisdom.Collection: Guy
as an economics professor I am by nature inclined to the view that the truth isn't out there, it's in here - that usually you learn a lot more by thinking really hard about the data than you do by sniffing around for supposedly inside information.Collection: Truth
I know that when I look at today’s Mexicans and Central Americans, they seem to me fundamentally the same as my grandparents seeking a better life in America. On the other side, however, open immigration can’t coexist with a strong social safety net; if you’re going to assure health care and a decent income to everyone, you can’t make that offer global. So Democrats have mixed feelings about immigration; in fact, it’s an agonizing issue.Collection: Strong
But where will the Fed find another bubble?Collection: Feds
A snarky but accurate description of monetary policy over the past five years is that the Federal Reserve successfully replaced the technology bubble with a housing bubbleCollection: Past
A message to progressives: By all means, hang Senator Joe Lieberman in effigy.Collection: Mean
Outrageous fiscal mendacity is neither historically normal nor bipartisan. It’s a modern Republican thing.Collection: Normal
What saved the economy, and the New Deal, was the enormous public works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy’s needs.Collection: War
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.Collection: Keys
...academic credentials are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for having your ideas taken seriously. If a famous professor repeatedly says stupid things, then tries to claim he never said them, there's no rule against calling him a mendacious idiot - and no special qualifications required to make that pronouncement other than doing your own homework.Conversely, if someone without formal credentials consistently makes trenchant, insightful observations, he or she has earned the right to be taken seriously, regardless of background.Collection: Stupid
Europe is often held up as a cautionary tale, a demonstration that if you try to make the economy less brutal, to take better care of your fellow citizens when they're down on their luck, you end up killing economic progress. But what European experience actually demonstrates is the opposite: social justice and progress can go hand in hand.Collection: Hands
I believe that the only important structural obstacles to world prosperity are the obsolete doctrines that clutter the minds of men.Collection: Believe
If you're doing your job right, some substantial group of people [is] going to be mad at you.Collection: Jobs
For most Americans, economic growth is a spectator sport.Collection: Sports
Congress has always had a soft spot for "experts" who tell members what they want to hear, whether it's supply-side economists declaring that tax cuts increase revenue or climate-change skeptics insisting that global warming is a myth.Collection: Cutting
What our economy needs is direct job creation by the government and mortgage-debt relief for stressed consumers. What it very much does not need is a transfer of billions of dollars to corporations that have no intention of hiring anyone except more lobbyists.Collection: Jobs
Most people, I suspect, still have in their minds an image of America as the great land of college education, unique in the extent to which higher learning is offered to the population at large. That image used to correspond to reality. But these days young Americans are considerably less likely than young people in many other countries to graduate from college. In fact, we have a college graduation rate that's slightly below the average across all advanced economies.Collection: Country
When depression economics prevails, the usual rules of economic policy no longer apply: virtue becomes vice, caution is risky and prudence is folly.Collection: Vices
If Europe’s example is any guide, here are the two secrets of coping with expensive oil: own fuel-efficient cars, and don’t drive them too much.Collection: Europe
Sometimes economists in official positions give bad advice; sometimes they give very, very bad advice; and sometimes they work at the OECD.Collection: Giving
The goal in the end is not to win elections. The goal is to change society.Collection: Winning
What happened after 9/11 - and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not - was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons....The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.Collection: Memories
If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. ... There was a Twilight Zone episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time, we don't need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.Collection: Twilight
However, the fact that an economist offers a theoretical analysis does not and should not automatically command respect. What is needed is some assurance that the analysis is actually relevant.Collection: Doe
If you want a simple model for predicting the unemployment rate in the United States over the next few years, here it is: It will be what Greenspan wants it to be, plus or minus a random error reflecting the fact that he is not quite God.Collection: Simple
You really have to go searching desperately to find any contemporary examples of good, old-fashioned runaway inflation.Collection: Example
I've always believed in expansionary monetary policy and if necessary fiscal policy when the economy is depressed.Collection: Fiscal Policy
The problem with digital books is that you can always find what you are looking for but you need to go to a bookstore to find what you weren't looking for.Collection: Book
Coming up with a good idea, with an insight into the way the world works that is really new and that you really believe in, is a deeply satisfying experience.Collection: Believe
Governments do not necessarily act in the national interest, especially when making detailed microeconomic interventions. Instead, they are influenced by interest group pressures. The kinds of interventions that new trade theory suggests can raise national income will typically raise the welfare of small, fortunate groups by large amounts, while imposing costs on larger, more diffuse groups.Collection: Philosophy
[T]he next time you hear serious-sounding people explaining the need for fiscal austerity, try to parse their argument. Almost surely, you'll discover that what sounds like hardheaded realism actually rests on a foundation of fantasy, on the belief that invisible vigilantes will punish us if we're bad and the confidence fairy will reward us if we're good. And real-world policy - policy that will blight the lives of millions of working families - is being built on that foundation.Collection: Real
The fact is that the two years or so after 9/11 were a terrible time in America – a time of political exploitation and intimidation, culminating in the deliberate misleading of the nation into the invasion of Iraq. It’s probably worth pointing out that I’m not saying anything now that I wasn’t saying in real time back then, when Bush had a sky-high approval rating and any criticism was denounced as treason. And there’s nothing I’ve done in my life of which I’m more proud.Collection: Real
[I]f you look at United States history since World War II, you find that of the 10 presidents who preceded Barack Obama, seven left office with a debt ratio lower than when they came in. Who were the three exceptions? Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes.Collection: War
Are you, or is someone you know, a gadget freak? If so, you doubtless know that Wednesday was iPhone 5 day, the day Apple unveiled its latest way for people to avoid actually speaking to or even looking at whoever they're with.Collection: Funny
What Republicans have actually put on the table is almost nothing. All of the rest is just big talk. So how is the president supposed to negotiate with people who say, 'Here's my demands. By the way, I can't give you any specifics. Just make me happy'?Collection: People
we should reject the attempt to divert the national conversation away from soaring inequality toward the alleged moral failings of those Americans being left behind. Traditional values aren't as crucial as social conservatives would have you believe and, in any case, the social changes taking place in America's working class are overwhelmingly the consequence of sharply rising inequality, not its cause.Collection: Believe
There has been plenty to criticize about President Obama’s handling of the economy. Yet the overriding story of the past few years is not Mr. Obama’s mistakes but the scorched-earth opposition of Republicans, who have done everything they can to get in his way - and who now, having blocked the president’s policies, hope to win the White House by claiming that his policies have failed.Collection: Mistake
[D]ebt increases that didn't arise either from war or from extraordinary financial crisis are entirely associated with hard-line conservative governments.Collection: War
The public has no idea that the deficit has been falling like a stone.Collection: Fall
America's political landscape is infested with many zombie ideas - beliefs about policy that have been repeatedly refuted with evidence and analysis but refuse to die. The most prominent zombie is the insistence that low taxes on rich people are the key to prosperity.Collection: Ideas
Every once in a while I feel despair over the fate of the planet. If you’ve been following climate science, you know what I mean: the sense that we’re hurtling toward catastrophe but nobody wants to hear about it or do anything to avert it.Collection: Mean
I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society.Collection: Years
Close the weak banks and impose serious capital requirements on the strong ones...You see, it may sound hard-hearted, but you cannot keep unsound financial institutions operating simply because they provide jobs.Collection: Strong
There's one thing that the Fed has been really good at cracking down on, and that's inflation.Collection: Feds
This is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics.Collection: Opposites