John Taylor is blogging

Those debt charts are certainly alarming.

I wish that he had specified which intervnetionist polices caused the problems. I can think of some, but I would like to know which ones he thought of and how much damage they each did. But people keep talking about this being the worst recession since the Great Depression. Maybe that is true. But remember that from 1975-83, the average unemployment rate and the average inflation rate were both 7.7%. So far we have had about one pretty bad year. But it is nothing like the 1975-83 period.

I hate it when typepad eats my brilliance. Oh well, the abbreviated version.

If all you had was this graph,

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_GhUVXaopHNE/SrbCITG0rvI/AAAAAAAAAD0/AJ0R0UBNSsE/s1600-h/graph011.gif

You would think that the government caused the crisis. John Taylor says as much.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/12/john-taylor-financial-crisis-opinions-columnists_0213_peter_robinson.html

It’s more plausible as a last straw catalyst than a direct cause, but I made several comments here at the time complaining that the stimulus checks were mucking with the spending data. Of course, it didn’t muck with the data as much as the government was hoping, but it made forecasting difficult.