runaway inflation

News Roundup

Congratulations to Louisville and Michigan. Man, Wichita State was a great story. Just didn’t have enough fire power to take out Louisville.

Still bumming about Roger Ebert.

Rick Warren’s son has committed suicide. My heart goes out to Pastor Warren and his family.

The Sequester is killing or has killed the jobs market. The economy was limping along gaining about 150,000 jobs per month. 88,000 jobs last month is sad. The economy needs help. Americans need help. Congress? What are you doing to create jobs?

Paul Krugman continues to fight for the working man and woman. He continues to argue that the government needs to do more to help the economy. He is 100% correct –

It turns out that the urge to purge — the urge to see depression as a necessary and somehow even desirable punishment for past sins, while inveighing against any attempt to mitigate suffering — is as strong as ever. Indeed, Mellonism is everywhere these days. Turn on CNBC or read an op-ed page, and the odds are that you won’t see someone arguing that the federal government and the Federal Reserve are doing too little to fight mass unemployment. Instead, you’re much more likely to encounter an alleged expert ranting about the evils of budget deficits and money creation, and denouncing Keynesian economics as the root of all evil.

Now, the fact is that these ranters have been wrong about everything, at every stage of the crisis, while the Keynesians have been mostly right. Remember how federal deficits were supposed to cause soaring interest rates? Never mind: After four years of such warnings, rates remain near historic lows — just as Keynesians predicted. Remember how running the printing presses was going to cause runaway inflation? Since the recession began, the Fed has more than tripled the size of its balance sheet, but inflation has averaged less than 2 percent. (more…)