Just months before he died, Atlantic Magazine interviewed Paul Samuelson at the age of 94. Paul Kedrosky published snippets from the interview. It appears that Samuelson hated libertarians so much that he even continued to identify Alan Greenspan as one, calling him an "Ayn Rander," even though he had long ago ditched his belief in such Randian concepts as the gold standard. Then he went on to identify Friedman as an extreme libertarian, even though Friedman was in favor of school vouchers, an automated money printing program and a negative income tax. Some libertarian. Here are the snippets:
On Greg Mankiw and Ben Bernanke
The 1980s trained macroeconomics — like Greg Mankiw and Ben Bernanke and so forth — became a very complacent group, very ill adapted to meet with a completely unpredictable and new situation, such as we’ve had.
On Robert Lucas and his acolytes
Those guys were useless at Federal Reserve meetings.
On Alan Greenspan
But the trouble is that he had been an Ayn Rander. You can take the boy out of the cult but you can’t take the cult out of the boy.
On Milton Friedman
He was a libertarian to the point of nuttiness.
On bubbles
And I’m not sure most of the people that get caught up in the middle of a bubble can be described as irrational. It seems pretty rational to buy a house and flip it in the next few weeks at a profit when that’s been happening for along time. It works both ways.
On the dollar
I think it’s almost inevitable that, with a billion people in China wide awake for the first time, and a billion people in India, there’s going to be some kind of a terrible run against the dollar. And I doubt it can stay orderly, because all of our own hedge funds will be right in the vanguard of the operation.
Smells like someone is way past their expiry date.
ReplyDeleteHere's the full interview:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2009/06/an-interview-with-paul-samuelson-part-one/19572/
I'm always flabbergasted that these Keynesians think of the Fed's funny money system as "capitalism" or "the free market". Always.
with a billion people in China wide awake for the first time, and a billion people in India, there’s going to be some kind of a terrible run against the dollar.
ReplyDeleteAny run on the dollar's value would have to have the cooperation of the producers of such bills in order to have people want to dump it. He seems to suggest that money supply has no bearing to whether or not the currency gets dumped at lower and lower prices. Is he saying that them furriners will be exclusively responsible for the dollars demise?