Speak for Yourself, Honey

Christina Romer makes an inauspicious exit to an inauspicious tenure as CEA Chair.

“To this day, economists don’t understand why firms cut production as much as they did, or why they cut labor so much more than they normally would,” said Romer. “The current recession has been fundamentally different from other post-war recessions… Rather than being caused by deliberate monetary actions, it began with interest rates at low levels… Precisely what has made it so terrifying, and so difficult to cure, is that we have been in largely uncharted territory.”

Speak for yourself sugar. Any businessman in America can tell you why firms cut production and labor as much as they did. Any housewife can tell you why "aggregate demand" has not revived. Only in the rarefied air of Obama's academic economic dream team are these things a mystery. No doubt every academic economist will maintain the strict code of collegiality (and political correctness - you can't tell a woman that she totally fucked up in a big job) and insist that Romer is a brilliant economist and still at the height of her profession, but the stark truth is that she has been a disaster and has squandered what credibility she had.

UPDATE: Wow, even Dana Millbank is depressed at how clueless Romer was/is.