Subject: Re: Krugman on the Fed
Paul Krugman has made numerous bad calls through the years as his left political slant has impacted his ability to think and articulate critically.

Can you name an economist who hasn't made “numerous bad calls”? across a career of 50 years?

Irving Fisher: “We have reached a permanent high plateau”

Alan Greenspan: “I never thought that banks could do something so destructive”

Paul Samuelson: “The socialist economy of the Soviet Union seems to work for them”

Janet Yellen: “transitory inflation”

Ravi Basra: “The Great Depression of 1990” Nice book. Totally wrong, of course.

Alan Greenspan (again) “We need double digit rates to prevent future inflation” (said in 2007, just before a more than decade long period of near zero rates - and no inflation.

I won’t bother mentioning Adam Smith’s overly-simple views of economics, or Thomas Malthus’ predictions of global doom, and heck, Keynes predicted a 15-hour work week by now.

I believe you’re letting your politics influence your evaluation of economists, rather than the other way around. If anyone has been wildly, catastrophically wrong over the past decades, it’s been Greenspan, a Libertarian in view and a free marketeer extraordinary who ushered in the elimination of budget surpluses with the GWB tax cuts, and championed free-handed banking regulation which led directly to the disaster of 2008.