On my daily rounds of the econosphere, including Professor Finkler’s post here, I note that Ken Rogoff’s Project Syndicate post is getting a lot of traction.
A perusal of the NYT website shows Rogoff here on the USA credit downgrade:
Europe’s plan was to have growth fix the problem. America’s plan was to have growth fix the problem. And that’s not going to work… I think it’s really starting to sink in that we’re not anywhere near an endgame.
And NYT columnist Thomas Friedman cites Rogoff here:
Why is everyone still referring to the recent financial crisis as the ‘Great Recession?’ … The phrase ‘Great Recession’ creates the impression that the economy is following the contours of a typical recession, only more severe — something like a really bad cold. … But the real problem is that the global economy is badly overleveraged, and there is no quick escape without a scheme to transfer wealth from creditors to debtors, either through defaults, financial repression, or inflation. … In a conventional recession the resumption of growth implies a reasonably brisk return to normalcy. The economy not only regains its lost ground, but, within a year, it typically catches up to its rising long-run trend. The aftermath of a typical deep financial crisis is something completely different. … It typically takes an economy more than four years just to reach the same per capita income level that it had attained at its pre-crisis peak. … Many commentators have argued that fiscal stimulus has largely failed not because it was misguided, but because it was not large enough to fight a ‘Great Recession.’ But, in a ‘Great Contraction,’ problem No. 1 is too much debt.
As for economists, Tyler Cowen thinks Rogoff’s contributions have legs:
I don’t expect anyone to change their mind at this point, but the “we should have had a much bigger stimulus” argument is unlikely to go down in intellectual history as the correct view. Instead, Ken Rogoff and Scott Sumner are likely to go down as the prophets of our times. We needed a big dose of inflation, promptly, right after the downturn. Repeat and rinse as necessary. But voters hate inflation and, collectively, we proved to be cowards. Too bad.
And Peter Klein also cites Rogoff favorably, though Klein conditions his response with respect to what he believes should be the central implication:
The main point is that a recession like the present one is structural, and has nothing do with shibboleths like “insufficient aggregate demand.” I wish Rogoff (here or in his important book with Carmen Reinhart) talked about credit expansion as the source of structural, sectoral imbalances that generate macroeconomic crises.
It’s almost enough to make you want to pick up the vaunted Reinhart and Rogoff book.
UPDATE: Rogoff in the Financial Times