Disaster and Denial

By PAUL KRUGMAN

When I first began writing for The Times, I was naïve about many things. But my biggest misconception was this: I actually believed that influential people could be moved by evidence, that they would change their views if events completely refuted their beliefs.

And to be fair, it does happen now and then. I’ve been highly critical of Alan Greenspan over the years (since long before it was fashionable), but give the former Fed chairman credit: he has admitted that he was wrong about the ability of financial markets to police themselves.

But he’s a rare case. Just how rare was demonstrated by what happened last Friday in the House of Representatives, when — with the meltdown caused by a runaway financial system still fresh in our minds, and the mass unemployment that meltdown caused still very much in evidence — every single Republican and 27 Democrats voted against a quite modest effort to rein in Wall Street excesses.

Let’s recall how we got into our current mess.

Read more . . .

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Tags: alan greenspan, Disaster and Denial, market crisis, mass unemployment, meltdown, michael tomasky, paul krugman

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 at 8:29 pm and is filed under Civilization, Consider This, Dire Warnings, Finance, Innovation Needed, NY Times, Need to Know, Shape of Things to Come?, Worth Repeating, economics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.