Monday, May 19, 2014

Is There an Austrian School Economist at the Washington Post?

I don't think WaPo economics columnist Robert J. Samuelson is a student of the Austrian school of economics, but he closes his review of Tim Geithner's new book, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises, with a comment that could have been written by any student of Austrian business cycle theory:
This is the central lesson of the crisis. Success at stabilizing and stimulating the economy in the short run can destabilize it in the long run. This also happened in the 1960s, when the belief that economists could control the business cycle led to inflation and instability in the 1970s and early 1980s. But the lesson is not acknowledged because its implications are unpopular (an obsession with short-term stability may backfire), and it’s ignored — or even denied — by the post-crisis narratives, including Geithner’s.
The paragraph above this quote in Samuelson's column makes clear he does not completely get what ABCT reveals, but the above paragraph is one sweet paragraph.

1 comment:

  1. It's a slow process, but people are waking up.

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