At least he's not a politician.
I admire Paul Krugman because he is so much more reasonable than most of his critics. We are here today to review an opinion piece of his, something my wife found in our local paper. You can find it here.
Krugman says we've been in this situation twice before, and says both times policymakers "stopped worrying about depression and started worrying about inflation" much too soon. He says that's happening again now. He says there's no need for worry about inflation, because "a rising monetary base isn't inflationary when you're in a liquidity trap."
Krugman also says something I totally agree with: "What about all that government borrowing? All it's doing is offsetting a plunge in private borrowing -- total borrowing is down, not up. Indeed, if the government weren't running a big deficit right now, the economy would probably be well on its way to a full-fledged depression."
Now I'm gonna be explicit about this, so read slow: I agree with Krugman that "all that government borrowing" is not the problem right now. But of course it's a problem. It's part of the central problem: All that borrowing... All that lending... All that debt. The central problem -- debt -- is the problem that got us where we are today. But now that we're here, we have a new problem: namely, the threat of depression. The moment this new problem arose it became a thousand times more significant than debt.