Neil Irwin in the Washington Post:
The U.S. economy has been growing glacially for the last four years. And, by almost all tellings, the overhang of debt from the pre-crisis years is a big part of the reason why.
By almost all of *my* tellings, yes. But I rarely see it anywhere else.
Anyhow, if Neil Irwin is right and people *do* generally say the "overhang" of debt is the reason economic growth is "glacially" slow, then why is no one saying we must reduce private debt? Oh, people were saying that, in the early months of the crisis. But that's all forgotten now. I've not seen the word "deleveraging" probably since 2009.
8 comments:
Perhaps I should point out that talking about talk of the debt problem is by no means the same as talking about the debt problem.
Krugman has certainly mentioned the private dept overhang recently.
"Debt overhang" has been choppy but with a horizontal trend until this summer when everyone else sudden;y decided to stop.
JzB
link.
http://www.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US#q=debt%20overhang&cmpt=q
Nice!
"...everyone else suddenly decided to stop." Haha, yeah. Nothing there at the end.
Oh, but look at this. I added "deleveraging" to your graph:
http://www.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US#q=debt%20overhang%2C%20deleveraging&cmpt=q
Maybe the blue line is Krugman's readers :)
He's probably referring to govt debt..... like most of the figuring liars
No I don't think so, Greg. Household debt, maybe. But Krugman has many other interests and does not focus on debt like he thinks debt is the prime mover in all of this. It's just one of many complaints for him, or so it seems to me... But Jazz keeps a better eye on Krugman than I do.
Greg -
No, it is definitely private debt.
You can disagree with PK, but do not put him in the liars camp.
JzB
Jazz
I was meaning to put Mr Irwin not Mr Krugman in the liars camp possibly. But maybe Mr Irwin was referring to private debt.
Post a Comment