"Paul Krugman is skillfully eradicating the very last traces of his credibility."

Left-wing NY Times columnist Paul Krugman declares that 'Bernie Sanders Isn't a Socialist.' And we laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

'Anyone with brains, common sense, and an educated background in the 'isms' knows exactly the kind of Kool aid Bernie's selling'

Remember this? Paul Krugman: Trump will bring global recession

Paul Krugman: Trump will bring global recession

By ADAM CANCRYN

 

11/09/2016 01:59 AM EST

The economic fallout of a Donald Trump presidency will probably be severe and widespread enough to plunge the world into recession, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman warned in a New York Times opinion piece published early Wednesday.

Calling Trump the "mother of all adverse effects," the Nobel Prize-winning economist predicted that the GOP nominee's administration could quickly undo the progress that the markets around the world have made in the eight years since the financial crisis. 

"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," he wrote. "What makes it especially bad right now, however, is the fundamentally fragile state much of the world is still in."

Krugman's pessimistic view comes in the wake of a more than 800-point plunge in U.S. stock futures that coincided with Trump's increasingly strong showing in the polls. Trump has repeatedly attacked the Federal Reserve, accusing Chairwoman Janet Yellen of keeping interest rates low in a bid to help the economy and get Hillary Clinton elected.

"Now comes the mother of all adverse effects — and what it brings with it is a regime that will be ignorant of economic policy and hostile to any effort to make it work," Krugman wrote. "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."

Experts predicted economic Armageddon under Trump — where are they now? Those who can do...those who can't either teach or become journalists

Experts predicted economic Armageddon under Trump — where are they now?

The economy is strong, unemployment is low and wages are rising, according to the latest economic data released Friday, which is in stark contrast to what the vast majority of elite economic opinion predicted just a few years ago from a Trump presidency.

The latest unemployment report has joblessness at 3.6%. Where is the Trump Armageddon Squad now?

What’s even more egregious is that the same folks predicting the end of the world refuse to provide sane analysis of radical proposals dribbling out of the mouths of the Democrats. They report on Medicare-for-All, the Green New Deal and college debt forgiveness as if these cockamamie ideas will have no impact on the economy.

First some full disclosure: While I was never a naysayer in the camp of Paul Krugman, I was never fully aboard the Trump economic train. I worried about his occasional dumb, offhand remarks on finance — he once blurted out he could renegotiate debt payments without understanding it was a form of default, which would lead to massively higher interest rates and lots of bad stuff to follow.

I continue to worry about his trade policies; while it’s fine to call out China for its bad behavior, going to trade war with the world as Trump sometimes suggests will lead to higher unemployment and inflation. Sometimes it seems Trump doesn’t understand that US manufacturers need Chinese buyers.

But I have read enough economics from the likes of Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek (and yes, those great economists who put it to practical use such as Jack Kemp and Ronald Reagan) to know there was plenty good in the Trump plan that he ran on back in 2016 and continues to propose today.

That’s why unemployment is where it is: Cutting taxes on individuals and businesses often propels economic growth because people — not inefficient governments — make the best decisions about where to allocate capital. And I said as much on these pages both before and after Trumps presidency.

SEE ALSO

Job growth surged in April, unemployment rate falls to 49-year low

Not so for many of my fellow pundits. For example, if you relied on the Washington Post just a month before Election Day 2016, you would think the economy was on the brink of disaster. “A President Trump Could Destroy the World,” screamed one headline from its editorial page, which predicted economic collapse because of Trump’s nationalist trade policies, ignoring, of course, he was proposing one of the largest fiscal stimuluses in years though his tax plan and deregulation.

Politico wrote that “Wall Street is set up for a major crash if Donald Trump shocks the world on Election Day and wins the White House,” in a piece citing various economists.

These geniuses believed a day of market volatility when it seemed like Trump might beat Hillary Clinton was evidence that stocks wouldn’t recover once the massive corporate tax cut from a Trump presidency kicked in (which is exactly what happened after futures sold off on election night).

No list of bad calls on the Trump economy would be complete without mentioning the not-so-sage words of The New York Times in-house economist and columnist Krugman.

It wasn’t too long ago that Krugman won the Noble prize in economics, which is startling given this bizarre post-Trump election prediction: “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.”

What school of economics was he following? Krugman doesn’t really say even as he continues to spew dreck predicting a severe economic collapse that never seems to come.

Again, we all make mistakes, and even a few of the Trump doubters such as entrepreneur Mark Cuban (famous for tweeting, “In the event that @realDonaldTrump wins, I have no doubt in my mind that the market tanks”) have more recently owned up to theirs.

The vast majority haven’t. Even worse they have ignored the revolutionary dumb economics of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and other Democratic candidates, who if in the driver’s seat, would really steer the economy and the markets over the cliff.

A reminder of how the "very wise people" economists are full of themselves

The American manufacturing renaissance is still defying expectations.

John Carney

Over the last 12 months, manufacturers have added 224,000 jobs. That’s the biggest annual gain since 1998, according to Wall Street economist Joe LaVorgna. Since the 2016 election, the economy has added 263,000 manufacturing jobs. Last month, 31,000 new manufacturing jobs came online.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way, according to the Very Wise People. Donald Trump’s promises to bring back manufacturing jobs was widely derided as impossible, and his supporters were mocked as suckers.

“Trump won’t be able to ‘make American great again’ by bringing back production jobs,” Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution wrote.

“What happens when people realize they’ve been taken?” Wharton emeritus professor of management Stephen J. Kobrin asked. “When people realize that he can’t bring back jobs and that they are not better off than they were two years ago, how does he use it–who does he blame it on?”

“Manufacturing jobs are never coming back,” Ben Casselman of FiveThirtyEight declaredin the summer of 2016.

Instead of focusing on reviving the manufacturing sector, politicians should focus on managing its decline, the Very Wise People insisted.

“[R]ather than play to that anger [over lost manufacturing jobs], candidates ought to be talking about ways to ensure that the service sector can manufacturing’s former role as a provider of dependeable decent-paying jobs,” Casselman wrote.

Why was it supposed to be impossible to revive manufacturing? Globalization couldn’t be reversed. Automation would make human manufacturing jobs redundant. Trump had offered “few specifics” about how he would change policies to benefit workers.

“The larger problem for Trump and his supporters is that there is very little reason to think that any set of policies could meaningfully reverse the long-term decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs,” Casselman wrote shortly after the election.

So how wrong were the Very Wise? Just about as wrong as they could possibly be.

“The manufacturing sector is adding jobs at a faster pace than the rest of the economy, which hasn’t happened much over the past half-century,” Justin Fox writes at BloombergView.

It’s clear that a number of the Trump policies and Trump-related phenomenon are helping:

1. The massive tax cut on businesses appears to be helping a lot and may have even started helping before it was passed.
2. The perception that the regulatory environment will no longer be a drag on businesses, particularly manufacturing businesses.
3. The revival of domestic oil and gas, another key Trump campaign promise, contributes to manufacturing jobs.
4. Consumers sentiment and business optimism are at or near decades-long record highs.
5. Manufacturers know Trump has their back and will make efforts to aid their export efforts and fend off cheap imports.
6. Foreign manufacturers are moving jobs into the U.S. in hopes of avoiding tariffs they fear are coming.

Of course, Trump is far from a place where he can fly a “mission accomplished” banner over the U.S. economy. As Alan Tonelson points out, wages remain flat for manufacturing. And manufacturing employment is still 8.24 percent below its pre-recession peak of 13.7 million jobs.

There’s more to do. But the revival of manufacturing does not look as challenging today as it did a few years ago.

Remember this Paul Krugman prediction about Trump's election? Reality bites Krugman!

Sarah Huckabee Sanders slays NY Times columnist with award mocking his failed Trump prediction

2 hours

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders honored the NYT's Paul Krugman with "worst prediction for the year" award. (Win McNamee/Getty Images) 

Chris EnloeWEEKEND EDITOR

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders handed out an impromptu award on Friday to a New York Times columnist — but it wasn’t for impeccable reporting.

What happened?

Sanders issued the “worst prediction for the year” award to Times columnist Paul Krugman on Friday for predicting President Donald Trump’s successful presidential election would sink the American economy to such a low point that it would never recover.

“If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never,” Krugman wrote on Election Day. “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.”

In reality, the economy is booming after Trump’s first year in office. The stock markets have soared since Inauguration Day, reaching new record after new record. Meanwhile, unemployment is at 4.1 percent — a 17-year low — and the housing market has regained everything it lost in the 2008 financial crisis and then some.

Cryto-currencies — especially Bitcoin — have found vitality this year as well. By all measures, the economy is booming and Trump’s promise to pass tax reform and deregulate the system is helping further the successes.

After Congress passed its tax reform bill last week, numerous major U.S. corporations announced how the bill would directly impact and help them — by providing bonuses for their employees and announcing new ventures.

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Is the CBO non partisan? Has the CBO ever been correct? Are CBO economists able to understand dynamic scoring Has anyone at the CBO ever read Bastiat?

House rejects Republican bills to punish CBO over scoring errors

By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times - Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Conservatives failed in their bid Wednesday to punish the Congressional Budget Office for its grim evaluations of GOP health care proposals, with the House rejecting two different efforts to strip funding from the nonpartisan agency.

Both Democratic and Republican leaders had opposed the efforts to spank the CBO, saying that Congress needs an independent auditor to evaluate spending, no matter how far off the estimates may turn out to be.

Conservatives were upset earlier this year after the CBO projected that the GOP’s Obamacare repeal-and-replace bill would leave some 23 million fewer Americans with health coverage in a decade.

Republican leaders said the budget analysts’ models were faulty, and pointed to a series of previous estimates where the CBO had botched things.

Rep. Mark Meadows, North Carolina Republican and chairman of the conservative Freedom Caucus, said the CBObungled past farm bill estimates by more than $100 billion.

Rep. Morgan Griffith, Virginia Republican, said just two years ago the CBO projected that selling off broadband spectrum wouldn’t net the government any money. In fact, he said, it netted $40 billion.“Time after time after time they’ve gotten things wrong,” he said, pushing his amendment to zero out the CBO’s budget analysis unit, axing 89 employees.

Opponents said shooting conservatives were punishing the bearers of bad news, rather than working within the rules.

“Just because your’e losing the game does not mean you can fire the ref,” said Rep. Don Beyer, Virginia Democrat.

Mr. Griffith’s proposal failed on a 309-116 vote, while another CBO-cutting proposal failed 314-107.

Former Federal Reserve Staffer Says Economists at Central Bank Don’t Know How Economy Works. So true!

Former Federal Reserve Staffer Says Economists at Central Bank Don’t Know How Economy Works

‘Global systemic risk has been exponentially amplified by the Fed’s actions’

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen / AP

BY: Ali Meyer  
February 8, 2017 4:47 pm

A former staffer at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has criticized the central bank, saying economists employed there don’t know how finance and the economy works, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Danielle DiMartino Booth was hired as an adviser to Richard Fisher, a former president of the Dallas Fed who also criticized quantitative easing—the Fed’s accommodative monetary policy following the financial crisis that increased the bank’s balance sheet to roughly $4.45 trillion.

Booth has written Fed Up: An Insider’s Take on Why the Federal Reserve Is Bad for America, a bookoutlining her experience and opinion of the central bank. It will be available for purchase next Tuesday.

Booth says that Federal Reserve economists use theoretical models to form their monetary policy decisions, which she says led them to miss the forces that contributed to the financial crisis. After the crisis, she says the Fed implemented the wrong remedies to revive the economy.

“Global systemic risk has been exponentially amplified by the Fed’s actions,” Booth says. “Who will pay when this credit bubble bursts? The poor and middle class, not the elites.”

Booth says many books about the Fed’s actions following the financial crisis have been written to make Fed officials look as good as possible because they are often written by the principals themselves.

“Ms. Booth describes a tribe of slow-moving Fed economists who dismiss those without high-level academic credentials,” the article states. “She counts Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen and former Fed leader Ben Bernanke among them.”

The writer obfuscates but Greenspan's remarks are statistically correct.

Greenspan: US Has Grown 'Scarcely at All' in Last 5 Years

Thursday, December 15, 2016 09:07 AM

By: F McGuire

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan warned that U.S. economic growth has essentially stalled in the last half-decade under President Barack Obama.
“A necessary condition for economic growth is that output per hour grows at a rate probably close to 2 percent. We're now under 0.5 percent, meaning we're essentially for the last five years have been growing scarcely at all,” he told Bloomberg TV. 
“”If you don't get output per hour growth, you will not get the type of GDP growth which the people who are talking about it, ‘we can now grow our way out of it,’  unless you change the fact that we've got this 9 percent average annual increase in entitlements, which is eating into the domestic savings of the economy, which in turn is a critical issue, which is required to get capital investment going and capital investment is the key element in productivity growth,” he said.
"So it's this entitlement issue, which nobody wants to discuss. The Democrats don't want to discuss it, the Republicans who actually have been spending more and faster rate than the Democrats in the last half century, nobody wants to touch it. It's the third rail of Americana politics,” he said.
“If you're running for office and you mention it, you lose. Unless and until that issue is addressed, I don't see we get the economy growing because we're borrowing savings from abroad, we're now up to $8 trillion debt net for the total system. You can't keep doing that and I doubt very much if we're going to be able to do very much more borrowing from abroad and if we can't do that and we don't have domestic savings because it's being crowded out by entitlements, where do you go from there?” he said.
“It's a nice idea to say, well we'll build our way out of it. Good luck.”
To be sure, Trump has said that Barack Obama has been "the first president in modern history not to have a single year of 3 percent growth." You can wonder about whether this is entirely fair, as Politifact did, but if you consult the Bureau of Economic Analysis's statistics on annual gross domestic product growth, which go back to 1930, it is undeniably true that there was at least one year of at least 3 percent growth during every presidency until the Obama years. And though 2016 isn't quite done yet, it will take a pretty spectacular fourth quarter to get growth over 3 percent for the year, Bloomberg reported.
Meanwhile, Greenspan himself does have his critics. For example, Newsmax Finance Insider Jeff Snider contends that "Greenspan’s credentials say nothing; his track record is all that should matter when judging the worth of his opinions."
Greenspan "doesn’t know what he is talking about and there is a mountain of evidence, including his own words, that show that he never did," Snider, in a recent blog, explained.
"We are stuck in this economic depression not just because of his past tenure, but more so now because constant reverence prevents acceptance of these facts. The recovery doesn’t start until the “maestro’s” legend dies, and with it all the confusion and misconstruction about how markets and the economy actually work," Snider wrote.

Peru elects economist

Peru election: Kuczynski wins, but Fujimori has yet to concede

• 9 June 2016
 
• From the section Latin America & Caribbean

Image copyrightREUTERS

Image captionPedro Pablo Kuczynski is an economist who wants to revive Peru's economy

With all votes counted, the economist Pedro Pablo Kuczynski appears to have won the majority of votes in Peru's cliff-hanger presidential election.

The electoral commission said he received 50.12% of votes, against 49.88% for his rival, Keiko Fujimori. 

About 50,000 ballots must first be settled by an electoral court before a winner can be officially declared.

Ms Fujimori has yet to concede, but Mr Kuczynski tweeted his thanks to the Peruvian people.

Image copyrightTWITTER

"It's time to work together for the future of our country," he told his followers on Twitter

This has been the tightest fought election in Peru in five decades.

As the last few votes were counted, the candidates remained neck-and-neck, with Mr Kuczynski leading by a tiny margin.

Image copyrightAP

Image captionKeiko Fujimori had led opinion polls for months

The closeness of the result came as a surprise after polls in the run-up to the election had suggested Ms Fujimori had a comfortable lead. 

Analysts said corruption scandals in Ms Fujimori's Popular Force Party may have dented her support since April, when she comfortably won the first round of voting.

She is the daughter of Peru's former President, Alberto Fujimori, who is in jail for crimes against humanity.

'Promoting economic growth'

Mr Kuczynski, who is an ex-Wall Street financier, said he would use his international financial experience to promote economic growth.

He has the support of prominent figures such as Nobel-Prize-winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and left-wing candidate Veronika Mendoza, who came third in the first round of voting.

But he has faced scrutiny over his close relationship to Peru's business elite.

Obama and Gruber: the men who destroyed the public's right to informed consent. Ends justify the means, right?

EDITORIAL: Jonathan Gruber’s payday

The MIT economist who is the brains behind Obamacare has made quite a stir with his admission that President Obama’s health care takeover was built on lies. Mr. Gruber says he was willing to say and do whatever it took to advance the scheme, and now it’s clear why. Obamacare made Mr. Gruber a multimillionaire, and at the expense of the taxpayers.

Video of Mr. Gruber’s remarks, delivered at a University of Pennsylvania health care conference last year, has surfaced in which he explained how the details of Obamacare were kept under wraps until the measure was rammed through the Democratic Congress with no opportunity for anyone to read the legislation. “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” Mr. Gruber said. “Call it the stupidity of the American voter, or whatever. But basically, that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”

Those “stupid” people have been extremely generous to Mr. Gruber. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) in 2010 investigated the $297,600 that the Department of Health and Human Services paid Mr. Gruber to sing the praises of the health care scheme. Congress — or part of Congress— was concerned that this payoff violated a federal law against paid government propaganda, but the GAO said it wasn’t a violation because Mr. Gruber had written his propaganda on his own time. Officially, he was paid only to “analyze various health care reform proposals and identify cost and coverage implications.”

---

This is an extraordinarily lucrative enterprise in the age of Obamacare that Mr. Gruber himself brought about. Individual states have lavished taxpayer cash on Mr. Gruber in return for cookie-cutter reports that describe the impact of Obamacare for each of the several states.

Minnesota, for example, used federal Obamacare grants to pay Mr. Gruber to attend one meeting, participate in a biweekly email list and print a copy of the report, all for $329,000. Wisconsin paid Mr. Gruber $400,000 for the same material, requested by the office of then-Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat. When the report was presented, Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, didn’t want Mr. Gruber at the news conference. Vermont is paying him another $400,000. Such a deal!

West Virginia, Maine, Colorado and Oregon have partaken of Mr. Gruber’s services, too, guaranteeing him a tidy sum. The money bought lies and deception. That’s Mr. Gruber’s characterization, not ours. “If you had a law which made it explicit that healthy people are going to pay in and sick people get money,” said Mr. Gruber, “it would not have passed.”

---

SEE ALSO: Nancy Pelosi caught lying: Never heard of Gruber despite citing him in 2009

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Truth prevailed, as it usually does. “This bill was written in a tortured way,” he said, “to make sure the [Congressional Budget Office] didn’t score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scores the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.” (Are you listening, Chief Justice Roberts?)

Democrats are scrambling now to push Mr. Gruber down the memory hole. The clicking you hear is his mug being Photoshopped out of photographs taken of him with Washington political notabilities. Josh Earnest, the president’s press secretary, dodges questions about Mr. Gruber, insisting the administration was entirely transparent throughout the entire consideration of Obamacare — the bill that Nancy Pelosi famously said had to be passed so everyone could see what was in it.

Given the amount of federal cash Mr. Gruber continues to pocket, Congress has a duty to order a full and complete audit of this work to make sure that no laws were broken and that the “stupid” taxpayers have received their money’s worth. While they’re at it, inquirers ought to consider whether Mr. Gruber’s dishonest politicking violates any ethical code at MIT. This flagrant Gruberism is another reason to repeal this abortion of a health care law.

Here is a list of Mr. Gruber's professional associations. Now, why would these groups, if they have any integrity, keep him on? Should shake your trust in these groups:

Ford Professor of Economics, MIT, 2014-present
Professor of Economics, MIT, 1997-2014
Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow, MIT, 2007-present
Associate Head, MIT Department of Economics, 2006-2008
Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy, U.S. Treasury Department, 1997-1998 Castle Krob Associate Professor of Economics, MIT, 1995-1997

Assistant Professor of Economics, MIT, 1992-1995

Director, National Bureau of Economic Research's Program on Health Care, 2009-present Director, National Bureau of Economic Research's Program on Children, 1996-2009 Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research, 1998-present
Faculty Research Fellow, National Bureau of Economic Research, 1992-1998

President-elect, American Society of Health Economists, 2014-present
Board of Directors of the Health Care Cost Institute, 2011- present
Board of the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority, 2006-present Associate Editor, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2009-present Associate Editor, Journal of Public Economics, 1997-2001, 2009-present
Associate Editor, Journal of Health Economics, 2001-present
Executive Committee, American Economics Association, 2010-2012
CBO Long Term Modeling Advisory Group, 2000-2010
Member, NIH Center for Scientific Review Study Section on Social Sciences, 1998-2002 Co-Editor, Journal of Health Economics, 1998-2001
Co-Editor, Journal of Public Economics, 2001-2009

This case is another example of the media ignoring a monsterously important story to protect Obama and the Democrats.