By your logic, we should immediately fire all State Department personnel the day a war breaks out, no doctor should remain licensed to practice during an epidemic, and policemen should lose there jobs if someone commits a crime.

Economists provide advice to policymakers; except for some department heads in universities, practicing economists don’t actually MAKE policy.

We’re advisors, and if no one listens, that’s worthy of note.

.

Yes, some of us did predict disaster, but when the stock market is roaring, who cares?

"the state-of-the-art tools of economic science were not capable of predicting with any degree of certainty the collapse of U.S. house prices that started in 2006."

Strikes me that the "start of the art tools" are these particular macroeconomists themselves. Whose tools? I'll leave that for another to argue.

Strikes me, too, that the tools the tools use are designed to look like tools and to sound like tools--for the benefit of those who observe the practitioner of this(black?)art from the sidelines. They look like tools because they have a lot of numbers and symbols in them, and they produce pretty graphs. They sound like tools by being named in polysyllables.

You want a bigger DUH
Quit exporting jobs overseas.

It appears the first priority of the Federal Reserve; is to protect the moneychangers,

The moneychangers want a return on they’re investments; but it’s dangerous if the homebuyers want a return on they’re investments?

"In the U.S., the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 gave the Federal Reserve responsibility for setting monetary policy. The Act was amended in 1977 to include the following two goals:
· Promote maximum sustainable output and employment
· Stable prices
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/stocks/08/monetary-policy.asp

How can the Fed promote maximum employment, all the while, companies expand they’re output outside the country; as long as the moneychangers benefit, NO PROBLEM?

Well Houston we got a problem.

People are losing they’re jobs and they’re homes.

The Federal Reserve has failed the working class; it appears the banker class; the moneychangers, are doing just fine.
As long as the money-changers are one step ahead of inflation, to heck with everyone else?

The majority of homebuyers factored in interest rates and the purchase price and concluded they could afford the house.
What the homeowners didn’t factor in, is a government that allowed the exporting of jobs overseas to the detriment of the working class.

One minute the Fed eager to raise interest rates because of the fears of inflation, and the next they fear deflation.

What we have is a Fed steering a course without a rudder.
Lacking a rudder of moral capacity.

A Federal Reserve, having more clout than individuals shouting about the reckless course we were on. A Federal Reserve that should have spoken up more forcefully about the damaging affects of financing two wars, and tax policies that benefited companies to expand overseas.

Proving they were only heartless servants of greed.

As long as the war profiteers and the banker class made money?

If the banker class wants to make more money and beat inflation, never fear, the friends of the Federal Reserve will just raise interest rates

People losing they’re homes and jobs
Mortgaged backed assets be damned

"If the American people ever allow private banks
to control the issue of their money,
first by inflation and then by deflation,
the banks and corporations that will
grow up around them (around the banks),
will deprive the people of their property
until their children will wake up homeless
on the continent their fathers conquered."
Thomas Jefferson Quote

I don't trust those fancy-pants global warming scientists either. Go with your gut feelings.

Steven Hill says he's 'shorting economists' since they don't know what to measure, and can't foretell massive bubbles:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/shorting_exonomists_the_experts_keep_getting_it_wrong_20100819/

(He leaves Dean Baker unscathed; whew!)

Based on such a miserable track record, I’m shorting economists and financial experts of all stripes. Most of them are wrong more than they are right. But that doesn’t prevent them from pontificating like an order of self-righteous priests. Considering how much damage they have caused, how many economic experts have lost their jobs or been otherwise defrocked? Indeed, many of the same people who caused the disaster—Fed chief Ben Bernanke, Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin, the latter two being Clinton treasury secretaries who got deregulation done, then split for Harvard and Citigroup, respectively—are still calling the shots. Summers, of course, is President Obama’s top economic adviser. Their economic priesthood protects its own, no matter how offending they have been, relocating them to another university or think tank, another government job or talking-head show.

So when the authorities say “a recovery is under way” or “stimulus rather than deficit reduction” or “deficit reduction instead of stimulus,” remember: These are the same experts who are unsure of how to measure, who too often substitute ideology and partisanship for broken theory, and usually have been flat wrong in their assessments. It is critically important that we find better measuring sticks and employ saner values for assessing what a successful economy looks like. Until then, we are flying in uncharted territory, without compass or radar, surrounded by fog. Heaven help us.

State-of-the-art tools of economic nescience is more accurate. The problem is only partly with particular "economists" and their desire to be lapdogs. Much more it is with the "economics" they purvey: A combination of mathematics they don't really understand using sufficiently many fudge factors to serve as window dressing, absurd assumptions having nothing to do with the real world and above all, contempt for real empirical and theoretical work, that tries to respect advanced theories like basic accounting and arithmetic. E.g. the DSGE models recently used by central banks assumed that private borrowers could not go broke, while governments could. Why should one be surprised at the garbage-out, when it is the result of 30+ years of garbage-in pseudomathematical dark age macroeconomics?

Dean Baker wrote his signature "bubble" paper in August 2002. He was wrong; there wasn't a house price bubble, then.

Three years later everyone (even a conventional dope like Brad DeLong) knew there was a bubble, but then, the issue was what to do about it. Janet Yellen advised (suggested?) "tighter supervision or changes in financial regulation" by which I assume she meant requiring larger down payments and limiting the leverage the banks and the GSEs were employing to keep the bubble inflating.

Greenspan didn't take her advice. Banks were allowed to gear their portfolios at 30:1; homeowners were given mortgages at 105% of the purchase price; and there was rampant fraud throughout the "originate-to-securitize" game played by Wall Street.

It wasn't the bubble that did us in; it was the leverage the players were permitted to use.