Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

While everyone is so focused on the anniversary of Lehman Brothers (9/15) and AIG (9/16), today is a different sort of anniversary: Its been exactly one year months since the single dumbest column ever published in The Washington Post appeared: Quit Doling Out That Bad-Economy Line. Breathtaking in its ignorance, shocking in its fallibility, astonishing in its author’s perversely misperceived world view, it stands as a monument to sheer cluelessness in a single person: “There have been 11 recessions since the Great Depression. And we’re nowhere close to being in the 12th one now. This isn’t just a matter of opinion. Words — even words as seemingly subjective as “recession” — have meaning.” -September 14, 2008 It turned out that we were already in a recession for 9 months — and it was about to get a whole lot worse. The article goes on to deny the Housing slump, misreads the debt markets, recommends equities, states that bank capital was more than sufficient, looked at employment ttends

What a crazy extremist loser he is. To recap: everything the Republican leaders said about Iraq turned out to be false, fictitious, imaginary -- and their false-pretense war led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings. Yet they're the sane, sober, Serious ones trying to ensure their party isn't dominated by the right-wing version of crazy traitorous losers like Jim McDermott, David Bonior and Scott Ritter. This is perfectly reflective of the prevailing Beltway mindset. One would be, I'd bet, hard-pressed to find many establishment journalists who reject the notion that war opponents like Jim McDermott are crazy, unSerious extremists while the Right's war proponents are still Serious and credible on national security.

THIS is not good. Not good at all. Barack Obama seems ready to respond to an International Trade Commission recommendation that America handle "dumping" of Chinese tyre imports by raising tariffs by...raising tariffs. Brad DeLong runs the numbers to explain why this is not a good idea. I'd argue that while the direct effects of the move are sufficient to move the tariffs into bad idea territory, the loss from the tire tariff is small relative to the potential loss of a series of retaliatory measures from both countries.... Mr Obama appears to be betting that because the products involved constitute a very small percentage of trade between the two economies, it is safe to earn some domestic political points on the matter without excessively angering Chinese officials or citizens. But this is a dangerous gamble, particularly amid a deep global recession.