Oh baby, you're so vicious: Paul Krugman on Tim Geithner's book

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jul/10/geithner-does-he-pass-test/?insrc=hpss

Excerpt:

The only way you can consider this record a success story is by comparing it with the Great Depression. And that’s a pretty low bar—after all, aren’t we supposed to know more about economic management than our grandfathers did?

In fact, we did have both the knowledge and the tools to fight this disaster. We know a lot about how fiscal policy works, and the United States clearly had the borrowing capacity to spend more on fighting unemployment. Whatever Geithner may say, it’s clear that a lot more could also have been done to reduce the burden of mortgage debt. Yet we didn’t do what needed to be done.

I like Geithner’s metaphor of a stress test—and his book is very much worth reading, especially for its account of the crisis. But he’s wrong about the outcome of that test. We can argue about how much of the blame rests with the Obama team, how much with the crazies in Congress who met every administration initiative, no matter how reasonable, with scorched-earth opposition. But the overall grade seems clear. We didn’t pass the test—we failed, badly.

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Mas:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jul/10/geithner-does-he-pass-test/?insrc=hpss