Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

For too long, Paul Krugman has exploited his authority… to heap opprobrium… has acquired a claque of like-minded bloggers who play a sinister game…. I would like to name and shame in this context Dean Baker, Josh Barro, Brad DeLong, Matthew O'Brien, Noah Smith, Matthew Yglesias and Justin Wolfers. Krugman and his acolytes evidently relish the viciousness of their attacks, priding themselves on the crassness of their language.

In my case I'm genuinely unaware of a situation in which I employed crass language to amplify a Paul Krugman attack on Ferguson…

I think I can help. I think that Matt's "sinister" deed here was in finding it funny to contrast Ferguson's 2003 enthusiastic advocacy of large short-run U.S. budget deficits under George W. Bush--when there was no macroeconomic case for them--with Ferguson's current root-and-branch opposition to large U.S. budget deficits under Barack Obama today--even though there is now a very strong macroeconomic case for them.

Matt goes on:

In my case I'm genuinely unaware of a situation in which I employed crass language to amplify a Paul Krugman attack on Ferguson, though I certainly have had occasion to disagree with Ferguson when he misstates Mitt Romney's educational credentials or blames Barack Obama for rapid Chinese economic growth or says J.M. Keynes was a bad economist because he was gay.

Ferguson might want to consider a meta-rational approach in which he wonders if the range of people who disagree with him about such matters doesn't possibly reflect Ferguson's own wrongness rather than the vast reach of the Krugman conspiracy.

Here's: Matthew Yglesias (July 26, 2010): Niall Ferguson Debates Himself:

I’ve been known to remark on the conservative movement’s strong adherence to Keynesian arguments as a justification for tax cuts in the wake of the mild 2001 recession, adherence that seems puzzling in light of their contrary rhetoric in the wake of the cataclysmic 2008-2009 downturn. Brad DeLong observes that one particularly hilarious example of this is historian-turned-pundit Niall Ferguson, who wrote a December 12, 2003 article on the Bush administration that’s in considerable conflict with his contemporary take on things. DeLong requests a Ferguson v Ferguson debate, and with assistance from Ryan McNeely I’m prepared to unveil one.

2003 Ferguson is in boldface, 2010 Ferguson is in italics:

<Guns or butter: this is the choice historians conventionally say that governments face. The administration is currently engaged in an audacious — some would say reckless — experiment to disprove this theory. To judge by his actions, the President’s response to the question “Guns or butter?” is: “Thanks, I’ll take both.” This, in short, is the guns and butter presidency.

Are there precedents for such a combination? What’s to say this deficit-spending won’t work? Keynes would tell us that in the current environment we must boost aggregate demand.

Certainly. Long before Keynes was even born, weak governments in countries from Argentina to Venezuela used to experiment with large peace-time deficits to see if there were ways of avoiding hard choices. The experiments invariably ended in one of two ways. Either the foreign lenders got fleeced through default, or the domestic lenders got fleeced through inflation.

But the United States has broken the guns or butter rule before. Under President Ronald Reagan, substantial increases in military spending coincided with comparable increases, relative to gross domestic product, in personal consumption — that proportion of G.D.P. that the public, as opposed to the government, spends. The crucial point, of course, is that in the short term at least, fiscal policy is not a zero-sum game.

But this doesn’t respond to long run inflationary fears. When economies were growing sluggishly, that could be slow in coming. But there invariably came a point when money creation by the central bank triggered an upsurge in inflationary expectations.

But, as Keynes remarked, in the long run we are all dead! Aren’t these “inflationary expectations” priced into the markets?

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who likens confidence to an imaginary “fairy” have failed to learn from decades of economic research on expectations. All it takes is one piece of bad news – a credit rating downgrade, for example – to trigger a sell-off.

But this will not be the kind of inflation experienced in the 1970′s and 1980′s. So powerful are the deflationary forces today (notably in the second and third biggest economies, Japan and Germany) that Washington can splurge on its military and social services with only a modest impact on expectations of inflation.

But it is not just inflation that bond investors fear. Foreign holders of US debt – and they account for 47 per cent of the federal debt in public hands – worry about some kind of future default.

But the United States has a unique advantage over all other sovereign borrowers: central banks and other institutions around the world need to hold dollars as the currency most frequently used in international transactions. While this is true, America can count on selling large amounts of dollar assets, like 10-year Treasury bonds, to foreigners — very large amounts.

But for how long? The evidence is very clear from surveys on both sides of the Atlantic. People are nervous of world war-sized deficits when there isn’t a war to justify them. According to a recent poll published in the FT, 45 per cent of Americans “think it likely that their government will be unable to meet its financial commitments within 10 years”. Surveys of business and consumer confidence paint a similar picture of mounting anxiety.

The only imminent danger is that the dollar could slide sharply against Asian currencies, as it has against the euro. But the chief losers then would be the Asians. And those who panicked about the debt under President Reagan failed to see how manageable it was. It’s even more manageable today. Hogwash. It was said of the Bourbons that they forgot nothing and learned nothing. The same could easily be said of some of today’s latter-day Keynesians!

Indeed!