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Partisan

Paul Krugman:

So last night I was on Larry King Live, dressed in my TV-from-the-Princeton-studio uniform: dress shirt, jacket, tie, shorts, and sandals (the camera doesn't pan below the belly button). With me, Andy Serwer of Fortune and Stephen Moore of the WSJ.

Moore offered an argument I hadn't heard before. The reason I hadn't heard it that it's really, really stupid. Our financial problems, he said, are caused by the falling dollar, which has reduced the value of American assets. It's hard even to know where to start on that. But, um, we're talking about balance sheets here; by and large the United States has liabilities in dollars (e.g., Chinese holdings of agency debt), while we have many assets that are, effectively, in foreign currency (Ford Germany is worth more when the euro rises against the dollar). So America's balance sheet improves when the dollar falls, which is actually a major issue in international macro modeling.

Plus, the weak dollar is good for exports, which are about the only source of strength our economy has.

But the WSJ crowd is deeply attached to the idea that a strong dollar = a strong country (and if you believe in America, you believe that asset prices only go up, too). So reason has no impact.

But Serwer's comments were what bothered me the most. He was saying that Obama and McCain are equally off on the financial crisis. I said that's not true: Obama has called for expanded regulation, while McCain takes his advice from people like Phil Gramm, who helped create this mess. Plus McCain's new line denouncing excessive executive bonuses makes no sense: Washington doesn't set executive compensation! Unless McCain is willing to say what he'd actually do, it's empty posturing.
And Serwer's response? "That's awfully partisan."

So there you have it: if the facts have a liberal bias, pointing them out is excessively partisan.

By fnord12 | September 17, 2008, 12:17 PM | Liberal Outrage