I'd call myself lazy

but it's not like Megan has posted since yesterday either. A shorter and a longer.

Debate liveblogging:

We have to remember Megan is sick, so her concern trolling and jokes left over from Saget's run on America's Funniest Home Videos aren't quite up to their usual level. I guess that also excuses this instance of her continued failure to provide any post debate conclusions with her liveblogging. Many pundits like to provide their opinion of who won a debate, oddly enough.

Paul Krugman: brilliant economist != clairvoyant:

Just because Krugman was right and Megan was wrong doesn't make him right and her wrong, silly not as-good-as-Megans. Didn't the Iraq War and torture and voting for George Bush and 2x4s n all the rest teach you anything? One of the reasons Megan chose an MBA is because of a genetic incapacity to self-reflect. She was wrong because she's right, and anyone who disagrees is only right because they're wrong.

I don't know how [a critical blogger] can quote me on Krugman almost a year ago, while somehow not noticing that I myself have been predicting that there would be economic trouble when the housing bubble popped. Almost every commenter who is not named David Lereah both recognized that we were in a housing bubble, and expected that when the housing bubble popped, the economic results would be ugly. My personal history with this prediction starts in 2004, when I started doing economic analyses for The Economist. But others, such as The Economist's Pam Woodall, have been saying it even longer.

Megan, we know you're a conservative when you blatantly lie about your record like this. "Don't listen to what I said, listen to what I'm saying I said." Don't, for example, look at this post, which I mentioned recently, where Megan echoes another in asking if there even was a housing bubble. Doing that might make Megan seem foolish to you, and she's supposed to be a expert.

What I--and, as far as I know, Paul Krugman--did not expect was the magnitude or the direction of the problems it would cause. We expected...

Krugman was Chicken Little, always predicting gloom and doom, but he didn't predict enough gloom? I doubt that's factually accurate for Megan to claim, but you've got to love her attempt to wrap herself in the authority of the very person she's trying to tear down in this post. "He's an idiot for making a mistake I also made, that he probably didn't actually make!"

I, and possibly Krugman--I don't really have time to comb through every column he's ever written right now--further expected...

It's much easier to criticize someone if you don't get hung up on what they actually said. Politicians and other liars have been proving that for centuries.

So the idea that Krugman has somehow won one for the team by predicting something that libertarian/conservative/free-market commentators didn't see coming is either misinformed, or lunatic.
...
Krugman also thought we might be about to get into a recession several earlier times, when I was more skeptical; in that sense, I called it better than he did. My care about calling a recession earlier in the year was not because I thought the economy was in fine fettle.

I wasn't wrong, YOU WERE. So there. I win, end of discussion.

(At this point, let me point out the obvious: a recession is, to a virtual certainty, either underway or about to hit. But in January, we hadn't had a banking crisis yet.)

..."or about to hit".
This is her job. I know I keep saying this, but I remain incredulous. She gets paid for this.

The belief that Paul Krugman is some sort of singularly talented prognosticator on matters of policy and the economy is almost entirely found among people who do not spend a lot of time reading the financial press

who, of course, have been spectacularly vindicated by recent events.

Krugman is a great popularizer of economics, but his writing is not filled with unique insights that cannot be gleaned elsewhere. He is a participant in arguments that range throughout the economics pages in more than a dozen publications, such as my old employer, the FT, the Wall Street Journal, Barrons, Bloomberg--plus economics blogs, a bunch of expensive newsletters you've probably never heard of, and the coffee machine of every economics department in the country.

Odd that this crisis came as such a surprise when everyone in the world knew it was coming, isn't it?
For those who follow baseball, this reminds me of old school sports journalists hating on Baseball Prospectus for being far more accurate in their predictions by pointing to, say, Detroit this year and saying "we all whiffed on them, what do they know", while ignoring Tampa. There's a reason Krugman is a noted expert in the field and you're a joke, Megan, and it isn't sexism. Y'know what was missing from this dissertation on why Krugman was only right when Megan blazed a path for him to follow? A single link or quote. It's much easier to show how someone said and thought exactly what you want them to when you don't get hung up on what they actually said and thought. Poor StrawKrugman, you never really had a chance.