| | | Don Surber
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Tuesday, June 14, 2022
Biden proves Krugman "right"
 Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman's manic-depressant take on the election of Donald John Trump as our 45th president was a glorious read for two reasons. The first being the flood of liberal tears he unleashed. Tasty. Mighty tasty.
But the second is this world renowned economist was totally wrong -- capital T and capital W.
The Princeton professor and New York Times column let his emotions run wild.
He wrote, "It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover?
"Frankly, I find it hard to care much, even though this is my specialty. The disaster for America and the world has so many aspects that the economic ramifications are way down my list of things to fear.
"Still, I guess people want an answer: If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.
"Under any circumstances, putting an irresponsible, ignorant man who takes his advice from all the wrong people in charge of the nation with the world’s most important economy would be very bad news. What makes it especially bad right now, however, is the fundamentally fragile state much of the world is still in, eight years after the great financial crisis."
He was angry that his candidate lost. He wanted the world to be punished for losing an election. He misread an initial drop in stock futures as proof of his genius and the world's stupidity. Within a few hours, he would learn the opposite was true.
Krugman ended his short column, "So we are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight. I suppose we could get lucky somehow. But on economics, as on everything else, a terrible thing has just happened."
Under Trump, the economy boomed, employment hit 50-year highs, wages surpassed inflation, and the stock market rose by 67% from his election tom his departure from office. Trump's policies were not designed by people who graduated from Harvard's school of government and were not focus-grouped to get the right wording. Instead, he applied his experience as a businessman and went with what works.
The last time a pundit was this wrong was in 1998 (now 24 years ago) someone wrote, "The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s."
And the name of that pundit was Paul Krugman.
Now we have Biden.
In an otherwise catastrophic presidency which has seen war and prices rise while our standard of living has fallen, Biden has accomplished one thing.
He has made Krugman's prediction of economic Armageddon come true.
A real recession nears, one that was caused by presidential incompetence and ignorance, and not caused by a pandemic panic.
Stock prices have tumbled about 20% so far this year and likely will fall another 20% because Biden's policies are so darned bad. Whereas under President Trump, America became energy independent for the first time in 50 years, Biden has stopped the drilling and made us reliant on dictators and other foreigners.
Food inflation hit 11.9% last month and the price of gasoline has more than doubled from the $2.379 a gallon that Trump left him.
As Krugman wrote nearly 6 years ago:
Under any circumstances, putting an irresponsible, ignorant man who takes his advice from all the wrong people in charge of the nation with the world’s most important economy would be very bad news. What makes it especially bad right now, however, is the fundamentally fragile state much of the world is still in, eight 14 years after the great financial crisis.
And yet Krugman voted for Biden nevertheless.
UPDATE: Oops, I left out the obligatory reference to Krugman serving as an economic adviser to Enron.
The man is always wrong. |
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