If you are getting mail from me I did not send it.
Calculated risk thinks he sees a housing bottom.
I think he sees a pause in the disaster and a very desperate building industry. Bank interest rates are not up. There are no loans to be had.
The paperwork problem is not fixed as far as I know.
Click on graph for larger image.The arrows point to some of the earlier peaks and troughs for these three measures.
The purpose of this graph is to show that these three indicators generally reach peaks and troughs together. Note that Residential Investment is quarterly and single-family starts and new home sales are monthly.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/10/culture-of-fraud/
Culture Of Fraud
Still on vacation, but I have internet access for a bit, and have checked in on a few matters. The big story of the week among the dismal science set is the Romney campaign’s white paper on economic policy, which represents a concerted effort by three economists — Glenn Hubbard, Greg Mankiw, and John Taylor — to destroy their own reputations. (Yes, there was a fourth author, Kevin Hassett. But the co-author of “Dow 36,000″ doesn’t exactly have a reputation to destroy).
And when I talk about destroying reputations, I don’t just mean saying things I disagree with. I mean flat-out, undeniable professional malpractice. It’s one thing to make shaky or even demonstrably wrong arguments. It’s something else to cite the work of other economists, claiming that it supports your position, when it does no such thing — and don’t take my word for it, listen to the protests of the cited economists.
And by the way, this isn’t obscure stuff. To take one example: the work of Mian and Sufi on household debt and the slump has been playing a big role in making the case for a demand-driven depression, which is exactly the kind of situation in which stimulus makes sense — so you have to be completely out of it and/or unscrupulous to cite some of their work and claim that it refutes the case for stimulus. Or to take another example, which Brad DeLong picks up, anyone following the debate knows that the Baker et al paper claiming to show that uncertainty is holding back recovery clearly identifies the relevant uncertainty as arising from things like the GOP’s brinksmanship over the debt ceiling — not things like Obamacare.
Can Hubbard, Mankiw, and Taylor really be that out of it? I don’t think so. They just believe that they can pull one over on the rubes, and pay no professional price. Let’s hope they’re wrong.
Simon Wren-Lewis wonders what could have possessed Mankiw and Taylor to sell their souls this way. I won’t pretend to have a full answer. But surely part of it is simply that they have been caught up in the vortex of the broader Romney campaign — a campaign that has made fraudulence part of its standard operating procedure. Remember, Romney spent months castigating President Obama because he “apologizes for America” — something Obama has never, in fact, actually done. Then he spent weeks declaring that Obama has denigrated small business by claiming that businessmen didn’t actually build their own firms — all based on a remark that was clearly about infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Romney’s tax plan is now a demonstrated fraud — big tax cuts for the rich that he claims would be offset by closing loopholes, but the Tax Policy Center has demonstrated that the arithmetic can’t possibly work. He turns out to have been dishonest about when he really left Bain. And on and on.
So this is a campaign that’s all about faking it — fake claims about Obama, fake claims about policy, fake claims about Romney’s personal history.
Is it really surprising, then, that the economists who have decided to lend their names to the campaign have been caught up in this culture of fraud? Maybe some of them were initially reluctant, or thought they could support the campaign with selective renderings of the truth. But the pressure was on to be team players, to give the campaign material it could use — and so, one day, they all ended up putting their names to a report that is just plain dishonest, in ways that can be and have been easily documented.
This would be a terrible thing even if it were in a defensible cause. It’s even worse when the goal is to elect a man who seems to have no core, no purpose save personal ambition."
And when I talk about destroying reputations, I don’t just mean saying things I disagree with. I mean flat-out, undeniable professional malpractice. It’s one thing to make shaky or even demonstrably wrong arguments. It’s something else to cite the work of other economists, claiming that it supports your position, when it does no such thing — and don’t take my word for it, listen to the protests of the cited economists.
And by the way, this isn’t obscure stuff. To take one example: the work of Mian and Sufi on household debt and the slump has been playing a big role in making the case for a demand-driven depression, which is exactly the kind of situation in which stimulus makes sense — so you have to be completely out of it and/or unscrupulous to cite some of their work and claim that it refutes the case for stimulus. Or to take another example, which Brad DeLong picks up, anyone following the debate knows that the Baker et al paper claiming to show that uncertainty is holding back recovery clearly identifies the relevant uncertainty as arising from things like the GOP’s brinksmanship over the debt ceiling — not things like Obamacare.
Can Hubbard, Mankiw, and Taylor really be that out of it? I don’t think so. They just believe that they can pull one over on the rubes, and pay no professional price. Let’s hope they’re wrong.
Simon Wren-Lewis wonders what could have possessed Mankiw and Taylor to sell their souls this way. I won’t pretend to have a full answer. But surely part of it is simply that they have been caught up in the vortex of the broader Romney campaign — a campaign that has made fraudulence part of its standard operating procedure. Remember, Romney spent months castigating President Obama because he “apologizes for America” — something Obama has never, in fact, actually done. Then he spent weeks declaring that Obama has denigrated small business by claiming that businessmen didn’t actually build their own firms — all based on a remark that was clearly about infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Romney’s tax plan is now a demonstrated fraud — big tax cuts for the rich that he claims would be offset by closing loopholes, but the Tax Policy Center has demonstrated that the arithmetic can’t possibly work. He turns out to have been dishonest about when he really left Bain. And on and on.
So this is a campaign that’s all about faking it — fake claims about Obama, fake claims about policy, fake claims about Romney’s personal history.
Is it really surprising, then, that the economists who have decided to lend their names to the campaign have been caught up in this culture of fraud? Maybe some of them were initially reluctant, or thought they could support the campaign with selective renderings of the truth. But the pressure was on to be team players, to give the campaign material it could use — and so, one day, they all ended up putting their names to a report that is just plain dishonest, in ways that can be and have been easily documented.
This would be a terrible thing even if it were in a defensible cause. It’s even worse when the goal is to elect a man who seems to have no core, no purpose save personal ambition."
Europe seems to be waiting for Germany to make up its mind.
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10 Aug 2012: Further indications of a slowdown in China add to eurozone data showing the extent of the economic downturn
594 comments - 9 Aug 2012: Athens' fragile coalition could be heading for a showdown with unions and anti-bailout forces over prospect of more job losses
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9 Aug 2012: Jürgen Habermas, Peter Bofinger and Julian Nida-Rümelin for Social Europe: Europe needs a new direction. A restructuring of the eurozone, including a transfer of sovereignty, is essential to end the crisis
UK recession may not be as deep as feared
10 Aug 2012
| 10 Comments Debt crisis: as it happened - August 10, 2012
10 Aug 2012
| 428 Comments Hard landing for China as factory prices fall and deflation looms
09 Aug 2012
| 146 Comments There’s no future in returning to Brown’s Britain
09 Aug 2012
| 529 Comments Mark Carney rules himself out of BoE race
09 Aug 2012
| 16 Comments Debt crisis: as it happened - August 9, 2012
Christian Noyer, a member of the European Central Bank's governing council, said the bank should be ready to intervene decisively in bond markets very soon as the bank slashed its growth expectations for next year.09 Aug 2012
| 276 Comments Recovery hopes dashed as trade deficit widens
A sharp rise in Britain’s trade deficit dealt a fresh blow to recovery hopes as a former deputy governor admitted the Bank of England was “clumsy and slow” in its initial response to the crisis.All parties must end.
Time to pay the band and turn the lights off.
The punch bowl is empty and there is no more.Call cabs for the drunks in the corners.
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A direct attack on faith is doomed to failure.
The North Koreans found that the most resistant to "brain washing" were the "true believers".
Our national problems center around "faiths" of one kind or another.
They are thus not reached by argument.
I am a Democrat by default.
As the party stands it will kill us less quickly than the Republicans.
If we have another Republican administration we will not survive it.
The echoes of the "Who "lost" China?" debate are still with us.
We must not go there again.
China in 1948 was their reds or our reds. Our reds were much like the current crop. Essentially corrupt.
U.S. foreign policy has tended to be reactionary since about 1924.
The Democrats lost credibility in 1920 and again in 1922
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Naval_Treaty
and again in 1923 with treaty of Versailles.
Yalta and Potsdam and Harry Truman sealed the deal.
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I would love to go off the grid.
Fossil carbon will be the death of our civilization.
We can transition now or our cities will drown in a few decades.
There will be nothing but the luxury trade and agriculture done here until China dissolves in anarchy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warring_States_Period
I really do not want to live with a real revolution from the left or the right.
Lynched bankers appeal no more than lynched democrats.
They all stink the same in a few days and every one else gets hungry.
The subsidies are to grid customers is my thought.
Solar can be done but it is not cheap.
A wood stove and local methane for cooking and backup heat would help with the first cost.
Yes, any laptop. An iPad if you insist. I find a real keyboard essential.
The Apple walled garden is not a good solution.
Microsoft is even less good.
Sooner is better. As soon as you can is best.
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