Bingeaux.

And that is precisely why there is no pressure at the top to change economic policy, why bother, the people they associate with are doing amazingly well.

That's a very clever way of stating the obvious - Americans have the attention span of gnats. Wave a shiny in front of their faces and they'll forget about the hip-deep pile of shit they're standing in.

And THAT is the most optimistic outcome.!
Worked for Japan for 20 some years, mostly because Japan population had a very high rate of savings.
We don't.

Maybe he's waking up to an entire global movement of people screaming this truth for the past 20 years (or longer, if you take Limits to Growth as a launching point). And if/when he does, the NYT will act like he's the first one to ever make this point.

However, I can't blame him for the naive hope that our politicians wouldn't race us off this cliff. I stupidly hoped that in 2008 with Dem control of the three branches that wiser heads would prevail and we'd have a new new deal that could employ people to improve mass transit, relocalize, work on every livable space in this country to better conserve energy, yada yada yada. Instead, the "smart" (corporate Dem) ones are bought off by Wall Street and consolidating their top incomes while the idiot right-wingers are trying to take us back to the policies of the mid-19th century.

Which reminds me to log off, now, or I'll let these realities ruin any constructive action I might otherwise take on this lovely Saturday.

LOL whatever happened to that

project in Philadelphia and high speed rail in some parts of the country.

And the amount of the stimulus was about half of what was needed.

connected. there was certainly no local boom in hiring for road-fixing and building, though roads were fixed and built.

not like ccc/wpa where the hiring was generalized and visible.

...One for the 21st Century disappeared from the radar screen the day after the election.

I think we've moved beyond 'maybe'.

Keep it simple.

You can't print the amount of money we are printing without inflation. It is basic economic law.

A reservoir of money is building up and eventually it will overwhelm the dyke. You can't have historically low interest rates, over a long period of time, without consequences. Especially in a system that discourages savings.

Here is a cool exercise to try.

Overlay a graphic of the amount of money created with the robust rises in the stock market.

We are actually printing dividends to shareholders. It is the only way to perpetuate the 401k myth.

The government owners are doing their level best to hide the inevitable collapse of our primary retirement system.

disappear and Monets and Picassos will lose a lot of their inflated value.
If you want to rent a large house for the summer in the Hamptons, you can be expected to shell out up to $900,000 - that figure will probably be cut in half as the non-productive financial sector takes a both.
Japan has held interest rates to near zero for a couple of decades because of their fear of deflation which is harder to cure than inflation.

with money printing, but instead with speculation & concentration of capital.

have been predicting that 'printing money' will bring on hyperinflation for a decade, and we've been closer to deflation than inflation.

hint: 'printing money' is rarely the cause of hyperinflation -- probably never.

Energy prices are volitile. Wages have declined significantly. Many people who lost full time jobs have had to settle for part time ones with no benefits. Much (if not most) of the workforce is living paycheck to paycheck. Small business are struggling to hang on. The "economic recovery" has gone entirely to Wall St...Main St is still in a bad recession.

back the causes to 1) monopoly power & 2) financial speculation. Throwing money into the economy is not the cause in & of itself. It could be argued that because a lot of the money being thrown in winds up in the pockets of the monopolists & speculators, it's the indirect cause, but that's because of the targeting of the cash, not the cash itself.

falling wages are not inflation (they're deflation). the affect on consumers is the same, but inflation = rising prices, not falling wages.

Explain it further please.

Making more capital available to banks has long been referred to as "printing money". I understand we live in a digital world now days. I understand that money is essentially ones and zeros in a data base. I understand that the money isn't actually being physically printed in huge volume.

I do understand it is being digitally created. I do understand that money creation causes inflation. It is basic economic law.

You can't make more of anything without decreasing it's overall value, including money.

This is a quantity theory of money and inflation that harks back to gold standard ideology. It's wrong.
Money, in our present day system, is created by private banks and other lenders, such as corporations that issue their own commercial paper and bonds. The latter is completely outside the control of the Federal Reserve, I think we can all agree on that. While private bank reserves are nominally under the control of the Fed, a mere moment's thought will show you exactly how wrong that is.
Say you run a bank. You will run it the same way any businessman runs any business: for maximum profit. If you're a bank, how do you do that? By making as many loans as possible. In bad times, like now, you'll be cautious about who you lend to. So let's put bad times like the present at the start of the cycle. Guy comes in for a loan, you'll make sure it's well collateralized and do some serious credit checks before you give him that loan.
Fast forward a few years, times are better. Guy comes in for a loan, you give it to him if his income (personal loan) or revenue (company loan) can cover the debt in the term specified.
Fast forward another few years, times are really good. Everyone's doing well. Guy comes in for a loan, you give it to him if you can plausibly come up with a scenario where growth in his income (personal loan) or revenue (company loan) will cover the loan.
The music stops when of course income and revenue stop growing.
Now look that over. At what point in the credit cycle I've just outlined above do you, when someone comes in for a loan, consult your bookkeeper slaving away in that room in the back with no a/c about what your reserves are? You don't.
You make the loan, it goes on the books. In the real world, here in the US (this will vary of course from country to country) you have to report your reserve ratio to the Fed once every two weeks. That ratio is an average of what it was over those two weeks. Any one loan likely isn't going to throw the average way off. Nevertheless, a report is produced as to the cash position of the bank every day by its latently talented IT department (from personal experience as a programmer I can tell you that most of the talent is latent). That report will detail for each day over the next seven days the projected change in the bank's cash position given the known loans that are going to mature, and therefore be paid off, and the known loans that are going to start, therefore sending money out of the bank, and any known deposits coming in or going out. Likely there'll be some plug factor for these various figures based on past experience.
If an unusually large amount of money is coming in or going out, and you have to get your hands on a slug of money fast to get that reserve ratio within limits, the Fed Funds traders go into action and either "buy" money on the Fed Funds marketplace, or "sell" it. The rate charged for the short term (usually overnight) loans that banks make to each other in this market is what the Fed Funds rate is.
The Fed, believe it or not, actually knows it exercises no real control over the money supply. They actually know what they do amounts to a bunch of hocus-pocus. A lot of market participants realize it too. But since the overall market thinks the Fed exercises control, interest rates will move based on what they say and do. It's a vast delusion.
The practical effect of knowing this, you ask? Simple: the quantity of money in circulation is a byproduct of the confidence the financial sector has in the economy. That in turn is a function of how well that economy is doing. When times are good, the quantity of money in circulation increases because as confidence increases more loans are made and more investors are willing to buy corporate bonds and commercial paper. Reverse this when times are bad. That's it.
The Fed can no more print money than you or I can. The economy will create that on its own according to its needs. We're all just along for the ride, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.

people in the US and western Europe that social safety nets are the problem.

The results of this could go either way. Either we are headed in the direction of Libertarianism, which would actually end up being neo-Feudalism, or people are going to see the political right is incorrect in its suggestions and the appropriate actions will be taken.

of taking economics classes in the 1980s. In 1981 or so, the unemployment rate had been over 5%, almost 6% for perhaps a decade. (my summary of the middle 1970s and early 80s is here http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hfojvt/142

I remember "learning" about something called "the full employment unemployment rate" which was said to be 5-6%. (which is kinda odd considering all the months of 3% unemployment rates we had in the 1950s.

My thinking at the time was - the US economy and prosperity was based - largely on war. What got us out of the great depression? - WWII. Then there was the Korean war, the Cold War and then Vietnam. What happened in the early 1970s? The Vietnam war ended finally and the US economy went into a recession.

But Krugman here seems to have forgotten the 1970s and 1980s when we had over a decade of unemployment typically well over 6%. It was only in the late 1990s that, to my astonishment, we started to have ridiculously low unemployment rates. If you look at the big picture, those were record low unemployment rates. And in the late 1990s they were matched also - by record low gas prices. Again, I was astonished. Gas went from $1.40 down, down down, below $1. and then even down to 90 cents. And it stayed there for a number of months, only jumping back up just in time to under-cut Gore's election.

Krugman seems to be writing like the mid 1990s are the "normal" for our economy. From what I have seen in my life-time, they were an aberration. And one that was driven by a few things - the innovation of the internet, and also several financial bubbles.

The EIGHTIES fits your description somewhat, as 7/10 years were high UE.

1970 = 3.9-6.1
1971 = 5.8-6.0
1972 = 5.2-5.8
1973 = 4.6-5.0
1974 = 5.1-7.2 (>6.6 = Dec only)
1975 = 8.1-9.0
1976 = 7.4-7.9
1977 = 6.4-7.6
1978 = 5.8-6.4
1979 = 5.6-6.0

1980 = 6.3-7.5
1981 = 7.2-8.5
1982 = 8.6-10.8
1983 = 8.5-10.4
1984 = 7.2-8.0
1985 = 7.0-8.4
1986 = 6.7-7.2
1987 = 5.7-6.6
1988 = 5.3-5.7
1989 = 5.0-5.4

http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet

"the 1970s and 1980s when we had over a decade of unemployment typically well over 6%"

so from some time in 1974 until some time in 1988 unemployment was never under 5.5% and was often over 7%. 14 years looks like well over a decade to me.

and even from 1971-1975 it was often over 5%

yet Krugman seems to be writing like he expects that unemployment should be under 5%.

and you think I was wrong to say it was typically well over 6% for over a decade. And I say 70s AND 80s.

From mid 1974 to mid 1988 and it was only UNDER 6% for perhaps 1 year in that 14 year span and it was never under 5.7%.

"Krugman here seems to have forgotten the 1970s and 1980s when we had over a decade of unemployment typically well over 6%."

Here are the UE numbers, month by month, 1974-1979.

it was the case in latin america for eons. the US is not exceptional. All it takes is for the generation that can remember something better to die out, and they are. The new generations are being educated to accept the status quo.

It was a restructuring, not a recovery. A desperate workforce is advantageous to the corporate overlords. Who posted a while back the musings of some corporate elite decades ago that the standard of living of Americans would have to be reduced? Anyone have that link?

If the PTB cared about the welfare of the millions of Americans who have been devastated and impoverished, this crisis would be number one on their agenda.

Instead, they are pushing the Trans-Pacific and cuts to Social Security.

The President of Wall St saw to it his pals got a quick recovery. The rest of the country is still in recession. And the future doesn't look any better as long as the corporatists control both parties.

eom

thanks