Paul Krugman Profile picture
Oct 31, 2020 8 tweets 2 min read Read on X
Next week is going to be horrible, for multiple reasons. One reason I haven't seen mentioned much in the media has come up a lot in my discussions with Wall Street types: the personal desperation of the Trumpies if he loses 1/
Trump himself, of course, faces likely financial ruin from his unpayable debts and perhaps criminal charges if he loses the shield of office. Quite a few officials will probably also face criminal charges for abuse of office, both political and financial 2/
But there's another, more mundane issue facing many lower-level Trump minions: they may not get the traditional soft landing available to former officials, in which you move into a cushy lobbying or industry job 3/
Normally service in government is a plus on your resume; serving this government, not so much. For one thing, everyone knows that the Trumpies aren't the A team, or even the B team; they're people who had nothing better to do 4/
What about K Street? The usual connections won't count for much: Democrats control the House. If they take the Senate too, they will play hardball, giving McConnell very little chance to shape legislation — and anyway, it's obvious that MM personally despises Trump and co 5/
So if you are, say, Trump's Deputy Assistant Secretary for small endangered mammals, who's going to offer you a job? You pretty much burned your bridges by joining this administration, and that has jammed the revolving door. 6/
And if you're tempted to mock my mixed metaphor, all I can say is that if Biden wins, the upper hand will be on the other foot 7/
What all this means is that we're going to be looking at some very desperate people, many willing to do extreme things to pull this out 8/

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More from @paulkrugman

Feb 17
With the recent rise in consumer sentiment, time to revisit this excellent Briefing Book paper. On reflection, I'd do it a bit differently; same basic conclusion, but I think partisan asymmetry explains even more of the remaining low numbers 1/ briefingbook.info/p/asymmetric-a…
The Michigan sentiment index has two components: current conditions and expectations. It's kind of legitimate to have partisan diffs on expectations, if you think your party has better policies. It's the gap on current conditions that's startling 2/ Image
Michigan doesn't provide partisan breakdowns every month until 2017 (hence the limited range of that chart). A quick and dirty approach is to use annual averages, with whatever months they do provide for each year, which lets us push back to 2006 3/
Read 7 tweets
Feb 10
Recent economic news has been extremely good. But there's a strange meme among some D consultants that Biden shouldn't boast about it, because it seems out of touch — that people aren't feeling the good economy. But they are! 1/
The venerable Michigan survey has rocketed up lately 2/ Image
It's true that consumer sentiment is still weaker than you might expect given the economic numbers. But that's largely partisanship. Using Civiqs numbers, Democrats have more or less fully accepted the good news 3/ Image
Read 7 tweets
Feb 2
Immigration is looming larger in the campaign, partly because it's becoming harder for Republicans to run against Biden on the economy. But there's a strong case that immigration has been a key part of Biden's economic success 1/
Inflation has come down so easily in part because of strong labor force growth. How much of that growth can be attributed to foreign-born workers? All of it 2/ Image
Some people might look at that and say that foreigners have stolen 3 million jobs from Americans. But we have full employment, indeed a very tight labor market. Look at what the Conference Board survey says 3/ Image
Read 6 tweets
Jan 26
A tale of two inflation measures. Some analysts are still citing the blue line, when they should be citing the red line. This is professional malpractice 1/ Image
Using annual core CPI puts you way behind the curve, for 2 reasons. First, annual: even core CPI was 4.6 in the first half of 2023, 3.2 in the second half. Second, known lags in official shelter prices lagging far behind market rents 2/
So annual CPI creates a spurious impression of stubborn inflation, with a difficult last mile to cover. PCE puts a lower weight on shelter, and on a shorter-term basis tells us that we've already traveled that last mile 3/
Read 4 tweets
Jan 24
The debate over Fed policy, especially about when to start cutting rates, seems to have become disconnected from the reality of rapid disinflation. Thinking about it reminded me of ... an experience I once had on a cycling trip 1/
In 2015, I think, I went on a week-long cycling tour in Vermont. I was in pretty good shape, but hadn't done a trip like that for a while, and was slightly worried about my stamina 2/
On the second day, I was getting close to what the notes from Discovery Tours said was a major climb. As I approached, there were a series of short, sharp uphills, and I thought "if this is the approach, the real thing must be really hard" 3/
Read 8 tweets
Jan 19
Debates about the causes of inflation and disinflation are getting strangely tangled, partly because some people don't seem to recognize that both aggregate demand and aggregate supply can shift. Here, using standard textbook pictures, is what I think happened 1/ Image
During the pandemic and early aftermath, we had a lot of fiscal stimulus. This sustained growth and employment despite an adverse supply shock, but doing so involved a temporary surge in inflation. Then the supply shock reversed, and we got immaculate disinflation 2/
Doing it this way avoided one risk — long-term scarring from a persistently depressed economy — while running another — inflation getting entrenched. Given how things have actually turned out, it seems obvious that policymakers made the right call 3/
Read 4 tweets

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