Imaginary Squabbles Part 5: Comparing Krugman’s 2005 Housing Bubble Forecasts to Mine

Alan Reynolds New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has recycled another phony argument about something I wrote many years ago.  He begins by citing Matt O’Brien who found that Fed governor Janet Yellen in October 2005 was predicting there would be no great impact on the economy “were the house-price bubble to deflate.” O’Brien concludes that, “Back in 2005, she didn’t appreciate how much shadow banks relied on AAA-rated mortgage-backed-securities (MBS) as collateral to fund their day-to-day operations—or how much even this supposedly high-quality collateral could go bust if housing did.” But that is “What Janet Yellen and Everyone Else Got Wrong,” as Krugman’s column is rightly titiled. Nobody in 2005 grasped what a precarious house-of-cards was being built, worldwide, on U.S. mortgage-backed securities.  O’Brien found another quote suggesting Yellen did get it right by December 2007. Yet the recession had already started by then, and blogger Bill McBride and others were worrying that rising unemployment would cause mass foreclosures (not the other way around). “We had a monstrous housing bubble,” writes Krugman, “and Janet Yellen recognized it in real time [December 2007]…. It’s important to notice that just being willing to see the obvious here puts Janet Yellen way ahead of a lot of people who still presume to give us advice on the economy.”    He links to a 2008 list of 28 people wh...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Source Type: blogs