Plus: More About Bed Bugs
1. Blowing The Great Recession.
“December 16, 2008, Chicago, Illinois: On a dark, snowy Chicago afternoon in mid-December, it was my immense privilege to have a seat at an historic table,” Jared Bernstein, former chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden, writes in his new The Reconnection Agenda.
“A few seats away from me sat the president-elect of the United States, the first African American to hold that title, Barack Obama. Next to him sat my new boss, the vice president-elect: Joe Biden. Scattered around the rectangle were some of the top economic and financial policy thinkers in the land: Christy Romer, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner.
“If the privilege was immense, so was the anguish. We knew the economy was in deep trouble. But we could not have known precisely how deep. As we sat there in December planning our economic counterattack against what would become known as the Great Recession, employers were cutting 700,000 jobs from their payrolls. The next month, as the new president took office, that number would jump to 800,000 – job losses of a magnitude that none of us had ever seen. Real gross domestic product (GDP), the broadest measure of the value of all the goods and services in the economy, was contracting at an 8 percent rate, which, if you follow these sorts of things, is technically termed a ‘nightmare.’
“I vividly recall the president-elect distinctly not emoting the attitude of the dog that caught the car it had been chasing (‘OK . . . now what are you gonna do with it?’). Like the rest of us, he viewed this in no small part as a technical problem.”
Quite.
Posted on April 29, 2015