Obama team tries again for Grand Bargain

[No Elephants]

http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2013/07/18/obama-team-again-tries-to-revive-the-grand-bargain/

I thought Michelle Obama's speecch was a highlight of the somewhat surreal (IMO) 2008 Democratic National Convention. (Up until then, I thought she was sabotaging the Obama campaign.)

After her speech, Obama told the story of their courtship of Michelle, how she had initially wanted nothing to do with him, but finally came around (reverse of most Democrats?). And, he wrapped it up with "You want a persistent President."

Five years later, I reply, "Not necessarily."

Amazing he/they are pursuing this, even after Reinhart and Rogoff's work has been discredited.

[Enthusiast]

1. It sickens me.

I will never believe that Reinhart and Rogoff's faulty conclusions were not intentional. It stands to reason that the usual suspects will pretend that their conclusions are still valid, banking on the filtering of media content to bolster the ruse.

We do not hear much argument in the media against austerity. Imagine that. Of course we now know the message is strictly controlled and seldom in our best interests. Hey we have to pay down this debt before we embark on a new and improved unnecessary war. Gotta keep them nasty WMDs in check, you know.

Raising taxes is out of the question. As if this rapidly increasing wildly distorted wealth disparity is just business as usual. We must preserve supply side trickle down at all costs.

A grand bargain that includes cuts to medicare and social security will guarantee a Republican majority in both houses of congress after 2014. Because the President and the Democratic Party will get the entire blame for any cuts. Two birds, one stone.

[No Elephants]

2. They still defend the original conclusions. I think the defense has also been debunked by

the same young man who found the errors originally, but I can't swear to it. I could google to see if the second paper was debunked, but, well, I don't feel like googling.



Sure does seem like the original errors were deliberate, though. Either that, or Rogoff and Reinhart are maroons, but their wikis don't support that suspicion. So, I'm going with agreeing with you on deliberate.


Note, that they had the IMF in common, same IMF that just help get Morsi "couped" with its demands for austerity.



Amazing how the shit just keeps folding in on itself.


Rogoff

Rogoff was the Charles and Marie Robertson Professor of International Affairs at Princeton University.<6>

In 2002, Rogoff was in the spotlight because of a dispute with Joseph Stiglitz, a former Chief Economist of the World Bank and 2001 Nobel Prize winner. After Stiglitz criticized the IMF in his book, Globalization and Its Discontents, Rogoff replied in an open letter.<7>

In April 2013, Rogoff was at the centre of worldwide attention with Carmen Reinhart (coauthor of the book This Time is Different) when their widely cited study "Growth in a Time of Debt" was shown to contain computation errors which critics claim undermine its central thesis that too much debt causes recession.<8><1> An analysis by Herndon, Ash and Pollin argued that "coding errors, selective exclusion of available data, and unconventional weighting of summary statistics lead to serious errors that inaccurately represent the relationship between public debt and GDP growth among 20 advanced economies in the post-war period."<9> Their calculations demonstrated that high debt countries grew at 2.2 percent, rather than the −0.1 percent figure initially cited by Reinhart and Rogoff.<10> Rogoff and Reinhardt claimed that their fundamental conclusions were accurate, despite the errors,<11><12> and after correcting the coding errors detected by their critics. Further papers by Rogoff and Reinhart,<13> and the International Monetary Fund,<14> which were not found to contain similar errors, reached conclusions similar to the initial paper. The subject remains controversial, because of the political ramifications of the research, though in Rogoff and Reinhart's words "he politically charged discussion ... has falsely equated our finding of a negative association between debt and growth with an unambiguous call for austerity."<15>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Rogoff


Reinhart

Born in Havana, Cuba, Reinhart arrived in the United States on January 6, 1966, with her mother and father and three suitcases. They settled in Pasadena, California during the early years before moving to South Florida, where she grew up. When the family moved to Miami, Reinhart started college at two-year Miami Dade College, before transferring to Florida International University, where she received a B.A. in Economics (summa cum laude) in 1975.<7> Recommended by Peter Montiel, an M.I.T. graduate teaching at FIU,<8> Reinhart in 1978 went on to attend Columbia University graduate school.<7> After Reinhart had passed her field examinations, she was hired as an economist by Bear Stearns, becoming the investment bank's chief economist three years later.<7> In 1988 she returned to Columbia to obtain her Ph.D. under supervision of Robert Mundell.<7> In the 1990s, she held several positions in the International Monetary Fund. From 2001 to 2003 she returned to the International Monetary Fund as Deputy Director at the Research Department. She has been the Minos A. Zombanakis Professor of the International Financial System at Harvard Kennedy School since 2012.<1>

She has served on the editorial boards of The American Economic Review, the Journal of International Economics, International Journal of Central Banking, among others.

In both 2011 and 2012 she was included in the 50 Most Influential ranking of Bloomberg Markets.She has written and published on a variety of topics in macroeconomics and international finance including: international capital flows, capital controls, inflation and commodity prices, banking and sovereign debt crises, currency crashes, and contagion. Her work has been published in scholarly journals such as The American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Her work is featured in the financial press, including The Economist,<9> Newsweek,<10> The Washington Post,<11> and The Wall Street Journal.<11> Her book (with Kenneth Rogoff), This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, studied the striking similarities of the recurring booms and busts that have characterized financial history.<8><12>

In 2013, Reinhart and Rogoff were in the spotlight after researchers discovered that their 2010 paper "Growth in a Time of Debt" in the American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings had a computational error. The work argued that debt above 90% of GDP was particularly harmful to economic growth, while corrections have shown that the negative correlation between debt and growth does not increase above 90%. A separate and previous criticism is that the negative correlation between debt and growth need not be causal. <6><13> Rogoff and Reinhardt claimed that their fundamental conclusions were accurate, despite the errors.<14><15>

A review by Herndon, Ash and Pollin of her widely cited paper with Rogoff, "Growth in a time of debt", argued that "coding errors, selective exclusion of available data, and unconventional weighting of summary statistics lead to serious errors that inaccurately represent the relationship between public debt and GDP growth among 20 advanced economies in the post-war period."<16><17><18>

[Enthusiast]

3. Thanks for sharing that......nt

[No Elephants]

6. You're welcome. I neglected to put the info about Rogoff in block quote (or any quote).

Although some bs and some errors do creep into wiki, I find it invaluable for an overview.

If any specific point is crucial, I look for other sources, but 9 times out of 10, it does the trick for a quick set of facts.

And, as Colbert's eponymous character once bemoaned, "Facts have a liberal bias."

[rpannier]

4. But he has no choice. He's not a King. What about congress. He's really outsmarting the republicans

You never really liked him. What's your plan? I suppose you'd rather he do nothing?

I know there are other excuses. I've just grown tired of writing all the things Obama supporters throw in to defend him.

[Enthusiast]

5. Yeah. They have whole raft of excuses......nt

[No Elephants]

8. On the wrong river. nt

[No Elephants]

7. I once assumed, without thinking about it, that

people were Democrats because they shared a set of core political, economic and moral beliefs and principles.

Turns out, I may have been mistaken. Maybe, it's all about the (D) or a particular person.

[No Elephants]

9. P.S. you could always copy and paste one of those lists of his accomplishments.

Oddly, it's the same list liberals use to prove his policies are, as he described them, those of a moderate Republican from the 1980s (who would be epitomized by Reagan, featured on Obama's list of best ten U.S. Presidents ever).

I wonder if Reagan will still make the cut after Obama adds his own name to the list? Perhaps he will edge out FDR? Cause it doesn't seem Obama really thought all that much of FDR's fiscal and social policies after all.

[Enthusiast]

10. What it tells me

is, the President simply doesn't appreciate the damage Reagan did to the nation's middle class, long term. Or maybe the President is simply more right than center right. Whatever the reason, I do not like it. How can anyone continue to believe in the failed supply side economics?

[No Elephants]

11. Thing is, I knew Reagan was on his list of top ten Presidents ever during the primary.

And I rationalized that away, just as I rationalized way every other thing I heard from him or about him that I did not like.

About Reagan, I thought to myself, "Everybody knows that Reagan won re-election by a landslide (electorally, anyway) and Obama is just trying to win over all those voters who seemed to idolize Reagan."

Besides, Reagan was also on Hillary's list of top ten US Presidents ever--and she had only nine open slots.

Besides, no matter what, I wasn't voting for Hillary; and I wasn't ready to vote Green. I did not even know who the Green nominee was until I started seeing "Don't blame me. I voted for McKinney" stickers. I don't know if I would have voted for her, either. though.

How is that, in a country of about 315 million folks,* the left got to choose only among two Reaganites and a woman who had slapped a cop while she was a member of Congress?

*P.S. Some friends play a drinking game when Obama gives a speech. Yes, you guessed it: Eveyone drinks whenever he says "folks."

[Enthusiast]

12. "Folks", lol.

He reminds me of the president in "We're All Bozos on This Bus".

"You broke the president!"

[No Elephants]

13. I should have cautioned:.

If you drink whenever he says "folks," you will not be fit to drive.