Krugman will never admit to being wrong. He's from an Ivy League School. Besides, being an economist means never having to say you're sorry.

See, it's too early to judge Obama...but never too early to judge Krugman!

It's not being "wrong" when you view some data one way and then later data allow for a different interpretation.

It's like imagining you can tell a landscape by just one part of the river. But as you go along, you see it differently.

Flexibility, reading the tea leaves according to each cup of tea makes good sense.

New info, new views. I like it! :)

"We have averted utter catastrophe, but how do we get real recovery?

"We can't all export our way to recovery. There's no other planet to trade with. So the road Japan took is not available to us all," Krugman said.

I think you may be a bit premature on the "Krugman is backtracking" meme.

I don't actually get the Krugman vs Obama wars in the blogosphere. Krugman's job is (partly) to try and figure out what is happening in the economy and to say what he thinks, including what he thinks will make it better. Obama's job is to try and figure out what is going on with the economy with the help of several hundred people who know more about it on some level than he does (including non-government people like Krugman who offer advice), also figure out what he can pull off politically, and try to manage a half dozen problems of large magnitude while also doing some of what he promised to fix health care, etc. It is predictable from this alone that they will disagree.

If you actually go to a Krugman talk (which I was lucky enough to do a couple of weeks back partly because Krugman was kind enough to forgo an honorarium to visit us in flyover country) you'll note he likes Obama. At at least one point he said something to the effect that he'd have done the bank thing differently, but they've made their choice, it wasn't an obviously wrong choice, and it might work. That was not the statement of a guy trying to give Obama more grief than he needed.

Furthermore, it is just dumb politics to go after left-wing critics of the administration. You want all the criticism of Obama to be from the right? And what would be the likely result of that do you think? When the various Democrats who thought it wise to add a guns in the national parks proviso to a banking bill that was too popular and needed to veto, you think the biggest worry for Obama is that left of center economists are giving him advice to move to the left. Note that it was some of these Democrats who from all appearances seem to have brought the stimulus down from a more useful level. It looked like Obama threw out a number and thought it would get ratcheted up by the Congress from there. And it almost was. But it surely wasn't left wing critics who whittled it back down. It was Ben Nelson, Olympia Snowe and Arlen Specter.

Finally, economists are never good at predicting the timing of anything. That Krugman is now saying the economy may stop going down a little sooner than he'd thought is not much in the way of back-tracking. We need the economy to do more than stop plummetting. It needs to go back up. And I think he and Obama know that and hope for it. They both see a large disaster for lots and lots of people in this country. Obama seems to think he may be able to end it quickly enough with less drastic measures than Krugman thinks may be needed (note the 'may be's). But when Olympia Snowe wants to cut Flu programs out of the next stimulus bill, it may be a good thing that there are people on the left clamoring for more rather than less stimulus.