A few months ago, I spent 5-6 hours interviewing Paul Krugman for Playboy magazine. It's now on-line here. He speaks candidly--surprise--about the economic misdeeds of Wall Street, the foolishness of the current austerity obsession and focus on the non-existent debt crisis, and a whole range of topics including his view that the Obama Administration did not understand the depth of the economic crisis.
I start with this:
PLAYBOY: Many complain that the Occupy Wall Street movement doesn’t have a clear message. What do you think?
KRUGMAN: I think OWS has done a great service. We didn’t need 10-point proposals. We needed someone to declare that the emperor was naked. The conversation has shifted since the protests began, and that’s good.[emphasis added]
With politicians on both sides adopting "populist" rhetoric, it's pretty obvious that OWS shifted the conversation--and Krugman saw that back in October before the newly-minted populist Newt Gingrich, who is second-to-none in his long record of shilling for corporate powers, started chirping about "vulture capitalism".
Krugman has this to say about Wall Street crimes:
PLAYBOY: What about Wall Street’s role?
KRUGMAN: If you’re asking why people were buying those houses, it’s because the money was being made available. Why was the money being made available? You had a whole machine making it seem as if dicey loans were actually safe, and a fair bit of predatory stuff was also going on. People were being pushed into mortgages they were told they could afford because they didn’t understand the fine print. Of course there was the slicing and dicing and tranching and making subprime toxic waste appear as triple-A bonds.
PLAYBOY: Were there people who knew what they were doing was wrong and yet kept doing it?
KRUGMAN: Yeah, exactly. Money was flowing easily. Regulators were largely absent on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States it was more systematic deregulation and nobody willing to say, “Hey, wait, this doesn’t make sense.” I doubt that many of them really understood just how bad it was going to be. But there were certainly people who understood they were cutting corners and taking risks that were much bigger than anyone was acknowledging. We have a situation in which people in the financial industry are very much “Heads I win, tails someone else loses.” The whole way compensation works is that if you can create even the illusion of high profitability for a few years, then when the thing collapses you can walk out of the wreckage a very rich man.
PLAYBOY: Were crimes committed here, and should people be in jail?
KRUGMAN: It’s hard for me to believe there were no crimes. Given the scale of this, given how many corners were being cut, some people must have violated laws. I think people should be in jail partly because I’m sure crimes were committed and partly because the lack of accountability is a serious problem. Something terrible happened and nobody has been held accountable. The public is angry, and a lot of the anger is being directed at the wrong targets.[emphasis added]
On Obama:
PLAYBOY: You perhaps more than anyone expressed surprise and disappointment in the president when he failed to champion a much larger stimulus in 2009.
KRUGMAN: Obama is very much an establishment sort of guy. The whole image of him as a transcendent figure was based on style rather than substance. If you actually looked at what he said, not how he said it, he said very establishment things. He’s a moderate, cautious, ameliorative guy. He tends to gravitate toward Beltway conventional wisdom. He’s a certain kind of policy wonk, the kind that looks for things that are sort of centrist in how Washington defines centrist. He was talking about Social Security cuts during the 2008 primary. That’s how you sound serious in our current political culture. He wasn’t sufficiently distanced to step back and say that a lot of our political culture is completely insane.
PLAYBOY: Of the three main political candidates in the 2008 primaries, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards had more progressive plans on health care than Obama.
KRUGMAN: Right. And we might notice that the really big debate, which was furious and screaming, was about whether we needed a mandate on health care reform. And the answer is of course we did. Obama was just wrong and, I have to say, demagoguing a bit during the primary by pretending you wouldn’t need it and by using that as a stick with which to beat Hillary. A lot of people who were normally like me didn’t like me because I was saying, “Obama’s really not the progressive you think he is.” And now they’re all saying, “He’s not the progressive we thought he was.” He came in prepared with the wrong set of instincts, and it’s taken a while to get past that.
You can read the rest...he's got a lot to say.