And that is why Europe, where negative rates dominate, is outgrowing the rest of the world?

Negative rates send the message that the financial system is badly screwed up. Since they mean the banks are taking a piece of your savings, they are anti-capital formation. That is also anti-growth. If negative rates worked, they would have worked. I don’t believe that charging lenders and giving the interest-rate return to the borrower is a great new idea that has finally been invented after 5,000 years of history that we know of. I think it’s an unmistakable sign of desperation and an extreme on an order we have never seen before. That last is a factual statement, of course.

I love that treatise by Bastiat. I first encountered a section of it in “The Libertarian Reader” by Mr. Boaz, and later read the whole thing. The trickier or more contentious section is the one called “Intermediates.” Do middle men have value, or are they a pure economic waste?

I’ve read a few other things he’d written by digging them up on the free download sites. Some seemed so elementary I’d wondered why he bothered to write them. The answer, in part, was that his articles were a response to articles written by Proudhon, one the founding fathers of the anarcho-syndicalist movement.

Paul Krugman is an agenda-spouting quack and a charlatan.

Yes, he has a Nobel Prize. So does Obama.

The man has been noted not once but TWICE expressing support for a known fallacy, the “Broken Window Fallacy”.

This fallacy is not some obscure or questionable piece of information, but a widely-known economic principle since 1850. Yes, **eighteen** fifty.

It is also basic enough that any bonehead can understand it. Even a Nobel Prize winning economist.

That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen
Frédéric Bastiat
http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html

Example 1:
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/14/opinion/reckonings-after-the-horror.html
First, the driving force behind the economic slowdown has been a plunge in business investment. Now, all of a sudden, we need some new office buildings. As I’ve already indicated, the destruction isn’t big compared with the economy, but rebuilding will generate at least some increase in business spending.

Example 2:
https://www.aei.org/economics/us-economy/paul-krugman-a-broken-window-equals-economic-strength/

Krugman is a two-bit cut rate shill for PostModern Liberals. He no longer cares a whit about The Truth, but only The Agenda.

From cooling to warming to change. They were right.

As usual, you either misunderstood my post or pretended to.

I did not say that the Times was admitting that the Times itself was wrong in its predictions. I said that the Times was admitting that certain “experts” were wrong in a particular set of economic/financial predictions.

I also said that the Times omitted the influence of politics in wrong predictions.

And then I said that the Times had omitted discussion of another “expert” who had been wrong in a major prediction he made, and I quoted the wrong prediction he had made. And that “expert” (Krugman) was the Times’ own expert.

I never said that Krugman was wrong about the same thing the other “experts” discussed by the Times earlier in the article were wrong about. My post was about the general topic of “experts” being wrong, and why they are so often wrong, and how the Times admitted that some had been wrong but didn’t want to discuss how its own “expert” (Krugman) had been so very wrong about the stock market under Trump.

I usually don’t read NYT, but for Manju’s maybe good comment, I did. He points out that NYT is complaining about “deficit hawks”, and how they’re complaining:
If we knew then what we know now, it would have had big implications for what seemed like sensible policy. The United States probably didn’t need to reduce budget deficits the way it did between 2013 and 2016, now that we know how much untapped growth potential there was. The Fed probably didn’t need to raise rates as quickly or as much as it did.

So the NYT claim is that budget deficits could have been bigger – MORE fed spending, than the (Rep dominated) Congress allowed Obama. Because the Reps historically have been anti-deficits. Obama made huge deficits, and so is Trump; not so many Dems are yet complaining about Trump’s deficits.

Manju is correctly claiming that the NYT is saying the (unnamed Rep) hawks against massive gov’t spending were wrong to push for lower deficits.

What is NOT mentioned is that good investment by the gov’t is OK, but bad investment by the gov’t, like boondoggle Solyndra, is terrible. The Dems wanted higher taxes and much higher gov’t chosen spending, which would be worse. The Reps were RIGHT to oppose boondoggle spending.

Trump continued high (too high?) spending, but with tax cuts increased the deficit (less % going to gov’t) by letting businesses invest in what the businesses thought would give the best Return On Investment. Getting high ROI is what rich folk are almost always all about. The gov’t investment is lousy on this (tho road building is often positive, most gov’t investment has negative ROI – a stadium worth $50 million costs $100 million of gov’t cash to build). Under Trump, $$ revenue going to the gov’t went UP, not down, after tax cuts – thanks to econ growth. (Laffer Curve, possibly more due to less regulations).

Paul Krugman (Nobel winning Dem attack dog at the NYT) has been consistently wrong in his predictions about the economy under Trump. He wrote good stuff on trade before and in order to win the Prize, but he’s been terrible since Trump won, tho long a Dem partisan.

The Fed didn’t raise rates much, but didn’t need to raise them at all. For more on Negative Interest rates, see Miles Kimball:
https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2019/12/5/miless-presentation-on-negative-interest-rate-policy-to-the-national-association-of-business-economists

I like Miles, but still don’t like negative rates, tho in small amounts they work like any other: Rate cuts work in every corner of the economy to encourage investment and consumption spending both

Sergey is correct that no “experts” on economics are good at predicting what the world or the US economy is going to do with much accuracy. (I studied econ, and know the famous Random Walk theory book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street )

For the last 3 years, Trump has been a better economy predictor than any Nobel winner I’ve been hearing about. He’s been favoring lower taxes (good), less regulation (very good), and high gov’t spending (questionable – but effective). Two out of three of my ideal — but his results following his ideas are better than the results of less gov’t spending. There might come a time in the next 1, 5, 10 years when this clearly changes, which will be another “black swan” recession for some reason. But that also might not happen.

There are still lots of regulations to get rid of which can unleash even more American dynamism. Plus the huge fracking / oil independence, which Dems and Obama were and are against, is helping more than is being given credit.

Trump gets reelected without a recession. The Dems want a recession.

International trade, he gets. In macroeconomics, microeconomics, and politics, my opinions are as well-informed as his. For that matter, so are your mother’s. Would you read my columns and think I knew anything special? Only if you were a fool. How about your mom? Krugman’s columns are no better.

–Robert Burns