Tuesday, November 24, 2009

New Blog: “Economists for Firing Larry Summers” from The Big Picture

 

While many people seem to be agitating for Turbo Timmy's dismissal, an underground drumbeat has begun calling for Summer's head:

How can you not find some appreciation for a blog that is devoted to helping a man spend more time with his loved ones?

fire sumers bog

Economists for Firing Larry Summers:

This blog is devoted to seeing to it that Larry Summers gets to spend more time with his family.

-Thorstein Veblen

Brilliant!

Here's a quick excerpt:

This from Vanity Fair:

Summers has plenty of other things figured out as well, including the origins of the current financial crisis, for which he has crafted a cogent explanation worthy of his reputation as a policy wonk and his days as a college debating champion at M.I.T. "I think crises like this get made by multiple cascading misjudgments," he explains, and then catalogues them: too much government spending, not enough private-sector saving, too much dependence on foreign debt, too much demand for "riskless" financial instruments that weren't, in fact, riskless …

The first three of these were, at best, only tangentially related. As much as I think the Bush tax cuts were a mistake, Republican inability to balance the budget really did not have anything to do with the crisis. Ditto for Private-sector saving (even though i think saving is good, generally…) Dependence on foreign debt had nothing to do with the crisis.

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