Paul Krugman

@pkrugman.bsky.social

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I know zilch about French politics. But the negative tone of English-language reporting on this election, the assumption that France will be ungovernable, seems strange. Why can’t parties that cooperated to turn back the far right find other ways to cooperate moving forward?

Vive la France!

Fun fact: Back in 2022, the FOMC was widely derided for predicting only a small rise in unemployment with core inflation rapidly falling. Those projections turn out to have been almost exactly right. www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypoli...

Way back in 2021 White House economists argued that the inflation surge resembled the spike after WWII and could be ended without major pain. They were right! www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-...

Wages rose 3.3 percent in 2019, 3.9 over the past year. Job growth slowing. The Fed is supposed to get ahead of the curve. Time to cut.

Jason Furman, 2022 (singled out only because he was admirably explicit): if unemployment stays low, inflation “will still be about 4% at the end of 2025.” www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/mrcb...

It looks as if a number of current UK Cabinet members will lose their seats. But don’t cry for them: George Osborne, who bears as much responsibility as anyone for Britain’s debacle, is making lots of money in the City www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

George Osborne to lead £2.4bn investment management firmwww.theguardian.com Former chancellor adds to roster of jobs with role as chair of Lingotto, owned by Agnelli family’s Exor

Kind of appropriate that Britain booted out the Conservatives on the 4th of July which is, of course, the day Vicksburg surrendered to U.S. Grant. I guess some other stuff also happened on this date

Labour’s campaign was extremely cautious, and given past defeats I understand why. But now the UK center-left has a huge majority in a system with many fewer choke points than in the U.S. Let’s hope they’re ready to govern like the dominant party they now are

Not a perfect comparison, and I’ve deliberately omitted the period when pandemic composition effects distorted the numbers. But 14 years of Conservative rule have been associated with stagnant real wages and severe deterioration of public services. This was a well-earned rout

I haven’t been paying as much attention as usual to inflation indicators. But we’ve been getting a string of good news. One source of inflation pessimism was the high ratio of job openings to unemployed workers. That issue has now gone away, with unemployment still very low 1/

In other news, inflation looks beaten. The blip a few months ago looks like start-of-year price resets, and what’s left is lagged housing costs

I really hated writing this www.nytimes.com/live/2024/06...

Opinion | The Point: Conversations and insights about the moment.www.nytimes.com

I’m in Warsaw talking about the future of the European economy, so I’m late to this party. But I’ll have a blog post up soon very reluctantly making the case for Biden — the best president of my adult life — to step aside in favor of Harris.

Not about the debate: I write in The Guardian about the legacy of austerity www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-...

How the ‘unforced error’ of austerity wrecked Britainwww.theguardian.com The Tories’ cuts were an obvious economic blunder, but their disastrous consequences are still piling up – and there is little hope Labour will reverse the damage

What people say versus what they do, part 10,000

Illuminating report on the state of American workers: eig.org/american-wor... My response essay here: eig.org/wp-content/u...

The American Worker Project: Toward a New Consensuseig.org The American Worker Project: Toward a New Consensus At the heart of the ongoing realignment of American politics is a fierce debate over how to improve the lives of workers. But too often missin...

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It seems certain that Trump will try to make crime an issue in the debate, even though Biden has ended the Trump crime wave — homicides in 2024 will be far lower than 2020, and probably below 2019. But anyway, I was struck by this by Maria Bartiromo 1/

I’ve been in a meeting with a number of men (and a handful of women) in suits, and while there has been intelligent discussion, my main impression is that Very Serious People are irrationally complacent about the consequences — economic and political — if Trump wins.

Is there really a last mile in inflation? Using Cleveland Fed nowcasts, here’s the picture for core PCE; bear in mind that lagged shelter is still exaggerating the numbers. That bump early this year looks like an aberration.

Do they really expect me to swallow that tripe? When it’s trippa alla Romana at Saltimbocca in Rome, yes

Trump’s tariff proposal is bad, but the Republican National Committee response is really scary. www.nytimes.com/live/2024/06...

Opinion | The Point: Conversations and insights about the moment.www.nytimes.com

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On the pod, @pkrugman.bsky.social is terrific on how dangerous it is that voters are forgetting the horrors of Trump's last year in office. "Everything that should have been a disqualifying personality flaw in 2020 has gotten far worse," Krugman says. Listen: newrepublic.com/article/1827...

Krugman: Trump’s Mental State Is Visibly Getting Much More Alarmingnewrepublic.com With Anthony Fauci revealing new details about Trump's unfitness to serve, columnist Paul Krugman explains why our amnesia about the damage wrought by his unstable temperament is so worrisome.

Extremely nerdy note: core inflation has been higher than headline. But this is NOT because volatile food and energy are driving disinflation. It’s because excluding food and energy raises the weight of shelter. Over the past year, headline ex-shelter is 2.1, core ex-shelter 1.9.

I keep seeing a factoid to the effect that the euro area and the US economies were the same size in 2008, but America is now 44 percent bigger. Folks, that’s just the exchange rate. At purchasing power parity, nothing like that has happened

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The BLS has finally updated its estimates of the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices, which excludes owners’ equivalent rent, a price nobody pays that is also a lagging indicator. Dude, where’s my inflation problem?

National reporting is incomplete, but with almost half a year in for NYC, the Trump crime wave is clearly over