Professors offer views on recession
Though the panel was planned months in advance, a quartet of professors charged with discussing solutions to the current recession ended up talking about the news of the day.
After all, they met just hours after President Barack Obama signed a $787 billion stimulus package into law.
Before an audience of over 350 in the Law School auditorium Tuesday night, economic professors John Geanakoplos ’75, William Nordhaus ’63, Robert Shiller and Yale Law School deputy dean Jonathan Macey LAW ’82 offered their perspective on the financial crisis in a panel moderated by University...
Hmmm...opinions from the folks who got us into this mess. At least one of these guys is (was?) a partner in a Hedge fund.
I was lucky enough to take classes tought by the 3 economists on the panel and they are some of the best economic minds in the country. A videotape would be nice
George Patsourakos
Americans need to realize that our current economic slump can only improve on its own -- and that will probably take at least three years. You cannot control the economy by throwing billions of dollars at it, any more than you can control a downpour of many days by confronting it with billions of blow dryers. I find the economic stimulus package -- which I prefer to call the economic stimulus nightmare -- to be a panic ploy used by President Obama, who was successful in obtaining congressional approval of it less than a month into his presidency. This $787 billion nightmare -- paid for by American taxpayers' hard-earned dollars -- is the largest amount of money ever approved by Congress in any law. This law also marks a turning point -- and sets a bad precedent -- for the federal government taking over a good portion of the private sector of our economy, and this will inevitably lead to socialism soon replacing capitalism in America!
We are a nation with a pathetic savings rate, a services economy without productive capabilities, and now Obama is sending $700 billion streaming into the system.
He is trying to reinflate the bubble! Unfortunately, the burst was not repaired.
We are f'd. Just wait until foreign currencies stop pegging to the dollar.
Actually, George, you're just wrong.
You CAN help an economy by throwing billions of dollars at it. You see that money, once it's spent, ends up in the hands of Americans, who will then spend that money, which again ends up in new hands, and so on. And that cycle is exactly what an economy (and it's health) is - money changing hands from person to person.
And before you start screaming next year that the stimulus "didn't work" because we're still in a recession, remember that the best economic minds mostly agree that the stimulus needs to be about $3 trillion to actually pull the economy out of recession - something people like you are certain to block. This doesn't mean that the money is thus wasted - wherever we are at that point, we'd in much worse shape if the money had never been spent.
I am so sick of hearing people suggesting that we just stick our heads in the sand. As these economists astutely point out, inaction is exactly why this mess went from bad to worse.
I wonder if you also used to believe that government regulation should not be allowed to "stifle innovation" of the major banks. All of these ideological (dare I say religious?) beliefs are nothing more than gut feelings that completely lack the support of evidence or mainstream economic logic.
Did the YDN video-tape this?