Saturday, October 8, 2011

Could this time have been different? - Ezra Klein/WAPO

This wonkish piece on the financial crisis by Ezra Klein is well worth the effort. In an excellent review of the policy choices of the last three years he shows that even now there are effective steps - like work-sharing - that can be taken. - GWC
Could this time have been different? - The Washington Post:
by Ezra Klein
"“We’re trying right now to keep our lifestyles going,” says Michael Spence, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at New York University. “It’s not really working, but the way we’re doing it is putting all the burden on the unemployed while trying to leave the employed untouched. Eventually, this is going to require a redistribution of that burden.”"


Perversely, the very size of the [2009 stimulus] package is part of its problem. With something extraordinary that is nevertheless not enough, the economy deteriorates, and the government sees its solutions discredited and its political standing weakened by the worsening economic storm. That keeps it from doing more.
Meanwhile, the opposition’s capacity to do more is arguably even more limited, as it has turned against whatever policies were tried in the first place. Add in the almost inevitable run-up in government debt, which imposes constraints in the eyes of the voters and, in some cases, in the eyes of the markets, and an economy that started by not doing enough is never able to get in front of the crisis.
These sorts of economic crises are, in other words, inherently politically destabilizing, and that makes a sufficient response, at least in a democracy, nearly impossible.

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