STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Tuesday, 28 October 2014

[Demeter]

5. Paul Krugman’s sloppy, wet kiss

http://www.salon.com/2014/10/19/thomas_frank_paul_krugmans_sloppy_wet_kiss/

Krugman's ode to Obama in Rolling Stone seems like the work of someone who hasn't read Krugman the last six years...Paul Krugman is easily the best newspaper columnist at work today; for years, he has been the only American columnist who matters. His relentless, one-man war on austerity, I believe, should have earned him a second Nobel Prize.

As Salon readers know, Krugman has for years been willing to criticize the Obama administration. However, in a much-discussed essay the economist published in Rolling Stone last week, he reverses himself and declares that Obama has won him over; that the president is “one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history.”

What makes Krugman’s article peculiar is that he now derides as irresponsible “Obama-bashing” some of the very criticisms of the administration that he himself has made over the years. In 2010, for example, he strongly hinted that bankers had been engaged in “white-collar looting”; in Rolling Stone he laughs at people who complain that “Wall Street hasn’t been punished.” The Krugman of today also, amazingly, distances himself from certain misguided souls who are upset because “income inequality remains so high”; amazing because this is a subject on which Krugman has written for decades—indeed, just a few months ago he penned a scorcher against people who deny the mushrooming problem of inequality.

Krugman tells us that his regard for the president was late to bloom. I myself moved in the opposite direction. I liked Obama a lot in 2008; in fact, I even voted for him during his ill-fated run for Congress in 2000. I anticipated great things from his presidency, in part because he wasn’t connected in any obvious way with the Clinton administration. And I have been increasingly disappointed by his performance as the years passed....Krugman’s approach in Rolling Stone is to take a look at these things and announce that the glass is half full, rather than half empty as his previous observations led him to believe. Based on this new and more accurate reading, he pronounces Obama to have earned Mount Rushmore status....

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