I have nothing to say about the valedictory remarks of Christina Romer, the departing chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors:
She had no idea how bad the economic collapse would be. She still doesn’t understand exactly why it was so bad. The response to the collapse was inadequate. And she doesn’t have much of an idea about how to fix things.
What she did have was a binder full of scary descriptions and warnings, offered with a perma-smile and singsong delivery: “Terrible recession. . . . Incredibly searing. . . . Dramatically below trend. . . . Suffering terribly. . . . Risk of making high unemployment permanent. . . . Economic nightmare.”
Satire herself (as Trotsky wrote in another context somewhere in his History of the Russian Revolution) stands mute.
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