Or at least the published and blogging ones....
Just saw this in a comment at nakedcap. A snip forma book written in 1992, in the wake of S & L and at the start of the serious movement (facilitated nicely by the :liberal" Democratic Clinton administration in concert with the "conservative" Gingrich Congress) to dismantled financial regulations that had been in place (some) for 50 or more years, culminating wtih the repeal of Glass-Stegal).
“That depression has now been with us twenty years.” — John Ralston Saul (writing in 1992 — from Voltaire’s Bastards)
2. The Theology of Power
Some twenty years ago the democratic, industrialized, developed world began a false but ferocious internal struggle which was said to be between the Left and the Right. It was, in fact, the death rattle of the Age of Reason. The slogans assigned to the two camps in this imaginary battle were remarkably familiar. Words such as reform, socialist, social democrat and government intervention were pitted against capitalist, conservative, individualism and established values.
The struggle appears to have been set off by two successive, crises. First, the loss of the Vietnam War by the United States destroyed a whole set of assumptions based upon American infallibility and accepted until then by all of the democracies. These beliefs had been in place since 1945. Although few of the democracies had supported the American Vietnam effort, they followed the greatest nation in the world in most other matters. The U.S. defeat left them — to say nothing of the United States itself — milling about in confusion. As they turned, the second crisis struck, in the form of an international economic failure. That depression has now been with us twenty years.
We have, however, become so accustomed to our political and business leaders addressing themselves only to limited manifestations of this crisis and always in a positive way — stimulating what they call a temporary recession or managing a Third World debt problem or waging a localized war against inflation or concentrating upon that portion of an economy which they have superficially stimulated to the point of explosion while the rest remains in profound decline — that we are never quite certain whether the depression is still with us or is on the point of disappearing. Nightly, it seems, we drop off to sleep with the vague expectation that all will be clear in the morning. Mysteriously, there is always a new explosion in the night and when we awake, the problem has been transformed into yet another limited manifestation.
This depression, of proportions as great if not greater than that of the 1930s, still engulfs us. None of our governments appear to have any idea of how to end it. How could they? The essence of rational leadership is control justified by expertise. To admit failure is to admit loss of control. Officially, therefore, we haven’t had a depression since the 1930s. And since most experts — the economists, for example — are part of the system, instead of being commentators in any real, independent sense, they contribute to the denial of reality. In other words, there is a constant need in our civilization to prefer illusions over reality, a need to deny our perceptions.
Indeed, we haven’t seen anything over the last twenty years which resembles the traditional profile of a depression. The reason is very simple. After the economic crisis of the 1930s, we created a multitude of control valves and safety nets in order to avoid any future general collapse — strict banking regulations, for example, social security programs and in some places national health care systems. These valves and nets have been remarkably successful, in spite of the strains and the mismanagement of the last two decades. However, because the rational system prevents anyone who accepts legal responsibility from taking enough distance to get a general view, many of our governments, desperate and misguided, have begun dismantling those valves and nets as a theoretical solution to the general crisis.
Worse still, tinkering with these instruments has become a substitute for addressing the problem itself. Thus financial deregulation is used to simulate growth through paper speculation. When this produces inflation, controls are applied to the real economy, producing unemployment. When this job problem becomes so bad that it must be attacked, the result is the lowering of employment standards. When this unstable job creation leads to new inflation, the result is high interest rates. And on around again, guided by the professional economists, who are in effect pursuing, step by step, an internal argument without any reference to historic reality. For example, in a single decade the idea of using public debt as an economic tool has moved from the heroic to the villainous. In the same period private debt went in the opposite direction, from the villainous to the heroic. This was possible only because economists kept their noses as close to each specific argument as possible and thus avoided invoking any serious comparisons and any reference to the real lessons of the preceding period.
In general terms all this means that management methods are being mistaken for solutions and so, as if in some sophisticated game, the problem is pushed on with a long rational stick from point to point around the field. As a result we are perpetually either on the edge of a recession (never in it, let alone in a depression, whatever the indicators say) or we are artificially flush and then manage to convince ourselves that we are flying high.
The accompanying political argument had been going on for a few years before it became clear that its vocabulary didn’t apply to the problem. For example, during the 1970s and 1980s, economic policies said to be of the Left in the United States, Canada, England and Germany led to the defeat of existing governments and to the election of new governments said to be of the Right. At the same time, identical policies in France, Spain, Australia and Italy were said to be of the Right and led to the replacement of their governments by those said to be of the Left.
This general confusion further clouded the public’s linear memory. For example, the American Right has been in power for twenty of the last twenty-four years. One of its central themes is law and order. The argument is that the American Left — the liberals, whatever that word means — is incapable of maintaining law and order. And yet for twenty years the levels of armed robbery, violent crime and murder have continued annually to grow to record highs — records both for the United States and in comparison to other Western countries. Still, the American Right persists in thinking of itself, and is thought of by its opponents on the Left, as the voice of law and order.
Krugman`s problem is he has to explain "why the sky isn`t blue" and on panel shows there isn`t the time to `nuance` for 15 minutes on each answer. It seems to me, he`s been around the block, he knows what he`s going to get into, so he needs to work on condensing his answers or just stay off the shows. Because he looks ridulous just looking down shaking his head mumbling about all the "misinformation" ...well Paul Tell us! tell us where we are wrong, I`m sure the hosts of some of these shows would grant him a little more time, but he`s going to have to tell us where he`s coming from to be worth that extra time. Igo to his Blog and it`s the S.O.S. he could explain himself taking as many pages as he would need, but noooo he writes 2 paragraphs complaining about "misinformation" that is only substantiated by the fact he calls it "misinformation". The bottomline is liberals like the direction they see Krugman wanting to go, but it`s just a pipe-dream only made legitimate by accussing his opponents of "misinformation". 
