It’s The Economy, Stupid (AKA Economists)

The economic truth is that you can’t have success without failure, you can’t have accountability without consequences. Governments are eliminating these crucial factors to give short-term relief, at the expense of killing long-term growth and innovation.

While quite a few economists identified the housing bubble as it occurred, fewer grasped the consequences of a housing-price collapse for the broader economy.

A second crisis was economic, or to be more precise financial, triggered by years of irresponsible mortgage lending, high-risk investments, and inadequate regulation of banks and other financial institutions in the United States and Europe. These practices came home to roost in 2007 and 2008, and it was not long before the crisis grew dramatically

judgmental adjustments to statistical forecasting methods resulted in forecasts that were about 15 percent more accurate. The idea that a statistical model would be able to “solve” the problem of economic forecasting was somewhat in vogue during the 1970s and 1980s when computers came into wider use. But as was the case in other fields, like earthq

In a 2009 article entitled “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?” Paul Krugman wrote that “this predictive failure was the least of the field’s problems. More important was the profession’s blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic failures in a market economy.”15

One result is little planning and wretched execution—as both Trump and Biden have demonstrated on trade, immigration, pandemic response, and foreign policy. Another is the willingness of both parties, when in power, to eke out near-term economic gains by means of fiscal and monetary stimulus—until stimulus must be withdrawn, and then everybody suff

Harry Truman said “a recession [is] when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose yours.”