Now! By popular demand! With more links to economists who DID predict how deep the recession would be, and who DID publicly say that the stimulus was not going to be enough.
Amazingly, no diary is up on the ridiculous statement uttered by Obama Administration spokesman Jay Carney on Morning Joe earlier today:
"There was not a single mainstream, Wall Street, academic economist who knew at the time, in January of 2009, just how deep the economic hole was that we were in."
Now, where have we heard something like that before? Oh yeah:
"I don't think anybody could have predicted that ... they would try to use an airplane as a missile."
And here's the just one of several pronouncements that are the equivalent of "Osama determined to strike in the US." In testimony before the House Budget Committee on January 29, 2009, Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf predicted unemployment exceeding 9 percent and an economy down by 7% for the next two years.
Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman read the CBO forecast and noted on January 8, 2009:
Grim as [the CBO] projection is, by the way, it’s actually optimistic compared with some independent forecasts. Mr. Obama himself has been saying that without a stimulus plan, the unemployment rate could go into double digits.
Even the C.B.O. says, however, that “economic output over the next two years will average 6.8 percent below its potential.” This translates into $2.1 trillion of lost production. “Our economy could fall $1 trillion short of its full capacity,” declared Mr. Obama on Thursday. Well, he was actually understating things.
To close a gap of more than $2 trillion — possibly a lot more, if the budget office projections turn out to be too optimistic — Mr. Obama offers a $775 billion plan. And that’s not enough.
Similarly, on January 28, 2009, James Galbraith accompanied a list of proposals to expand the proposed stimulus with this rationale:
If we are in a true financial crisis of the type in the 1930s — and there are many good reasons to think that we are — then the approach of a short-term stimulus combined with troubled-asset relief will not do the whole job. It will become necessary to think and act on a larger scale, to recognize that the private financial sector will not recover until after household balance sheets have been restored.
Of course, anybody who follows the economy already knew that a host of economists in addition to Krugman and Galbraith were predicting a deep recession, if not outright depression, in January 2009 and earlier. Indeed,
Huffington Post is already skewering Obama with a story with links to statements from various well-known economists who publicly and loudly predicted exactly would happen as early as January, 2009, among them Martin Feldstein at Harvard, and Joseph Stiglitz at Columbia. Not to mention that Nouriel Roubini at NYU famously predicted the whole financial crash and resultant depression as early as 2006.
I suppose that of those who predicted the Great Recession, the mavericky Roubini could be thought of as "not mainstream." But the real problem is that most of the aforementioned economists, with the exception of Feldstein, can be described as "left-leaning."
Unfortunately, Obama and his economic advisors weren't listening to all the "left-leaning" economists mentioned above (or the single conservative economist, monetarist Feldstein). They were listening to Larry Summers, who had provided much of the intellectual support for the deregulation of the banking industry in the late 1990's, and Ben Bernanke, who failed to understand the systemic problem until it was too late (if then), and Tim Geithner, ditto. Meanwhile, all the economists who were railing about the inadequate size of the stimulus were intentionally excluded from the policy discussions, every single one.
For Obama to now claim that "no one could have predicted" what happened really shows how little his administration listens to anyone on the left (hysterical claims by Teahadists notwithstanding).
How many of you thought, as I did, that we had elected another Franklin Roosevelt, just when we needed one? How many have watched Obama take office only to repeatedly give away progressive positions in a fruitless attempt to appease Republicans, and concluded that, instead, we got Neville Chamberlain?