« Worth a thousand words | Main | Wolf/lamb win/win »

Dollar, schmollar

By Owen Paine on Saturday April 19, 2008 12:08 PM

Picture of Paul Krugman Question for the fair-minded, the nuanced and the shrewdly prudently, inclusive -- is the bright beaverish imp at left (now somewhat grayer, alas) nothing but a "corporate liberal" bag man?

So say my friends the Ralph raiders:

"The corporate liberal media continues to give the cold shoulder to Nader/Gonzalez.

Case in point-New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.

Last month, Krugman was looking for a presidential candidacy to take on Wall Street.

He ran down the list and found Senators McCain, Obama and Clinton lacking.

But he ignored Nader/Gonzalez."

Paul K is a dembot, for sure, and, one guesses, an anti-spoilercrat as much as the next politics-of-the-possible type. But does that make him a corporate liberal stooge?

It does blinker him. Note this blog post from the great man:

"One thing that doesnt seem to have gotten much scrutiny in the bitter controversy is the suggestion that the past 25 years have been an era of continuous economic hardship for the American heartland. If were talking about the decline of industrial cities, there's some truth to that picture. But if were talking about incomes and employment, the Clinton years were pretty good for middle-income Americans and especially good for middle-income Midwesterners....

Did people feel that the Midwest was booming during the 1990s? Yes. Here's a link to a 1997 paper from Economic Perspectives titled Reversal Of Fortune: Understanding the Midwest Recovery.

Read the paper and you find out that the mid-90's rust belt recovery was the product of a low-dollar policy implemented by the GOP's James Baker, who built the Plaza accords, which dropped the the wildly overpriced Reagan dollar against the Euro block and... and... and... the yen!

In fact, it was the malign neglect of the dollar's forex value, even as it subsequently rerose to toxic heights in the late 90's, that did the dirtiest deed -- and of course that was by the Dembot Rubinomicals.

Just as both the rupee and rmb -- after the '97 Asian currency crackup -- started a serious commitment to a long-run lowball dollar-peg policy -- and at a then insanely out of whack exchange rate -- the dollar itself began to rise too far and too fast against the Euro and Yen and other northern currencies. It was a double whammy.

Hell herself could contrive no worse fate for our industrial heartland than the global strong exportable dollar ambitions of Wall Street's premier jackasses Bob Rubin and Larry Summers.

But this is not the lesson dutiful Paul draws:

"I'm not trying to boost Hillary here. Even from his own point of view, it's just crazy for the likely Democratic nominee [i.e. Obama --ed.] to denigrate the economic record of... the only Democratic president most Americans remember."

Comments (6)

dermocrat:

someone get this man a copy of Contours of Descent !!!

op:

lets get Pollinated .... eh derm ???

op:

“Contours of Descent is lucid economics as if reality matters. Cutting through the myths, hype and diversionary corporate-side indicators, Professor Pollin lays out an agenda to turn around the economy that is increasingly disconnecting from millions of workers and their well-being. A laser-beam exposure of globalization as defined by the World Bank, the IMF, Alan Greenspan and the corporate supremacists.” — Ralph Nader


op:

"laser-beam "..."exposure" ???

well...okay
but does his suggested design
for an avenging light sabre
cut thru corporate tenticles ???

David D:

Darth Pollin??!!! What an awesome title,'contours of descent.' He must be good friends with Michio Kushi.

op:

Some encouraging
"Disturbing Facts ":

From James J. Heckman and Paul A. LaFontaine
{via mephisto mankiw (via Richard Green)}:

"After adjusting for multiple sources of bias and differences in sample construction, we establish that (1) the U.S. high school graduation rate peaked at around 80 percent in the late 1960s and then declined by 4-5 percentage points; (2) the actual high school graduation rate is substantially lower than the 88 percent estimate of the status completion rate issued by the NCIS [National Center for Educational Statistics]; (3) about 65 percent of blacks and Hispanics leave school with a high school diploma, and minority graduation rates are still substantially below the rates for non-Hispanic whites. In fact, we find no evidence of convergence in minority-majority graduation rates over the past 35 years...."


cherry on top

"...A significant portion of the convergence reported in the official statistics is due to black males obtaining GED credentials in prison"

Post a comment

Note also that comments with three or more links may be held for "moderation" -- a strange term to apply to the ghost in this blog's machine. Seems to be a hard-coded limitation of the blog software, unfortunately.

About

This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on Saturday April 19, 2008 12:08 PM.

The previous post in this blog was Worth a thousand words.

The next post in this blog is Wolf/lamb win/win.

Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.

Creative Commons License

This weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Powered by
Movable Type 3.31