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Trump is flirting with quack economics
Republicans denounce President Joe Biden for the inflation that occurred on his watch. But Trump’s advisers have been floating policy ideas that could be far more inflationary.
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Destructive economic policy isn’t the thing that alarms the author the most about Trump’s potential return to power, but it's definitely a worry.
PHOTO: NYTIMES
Paul Krugman
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More than 30 years ago, the economists Rudiger Dornbusch (one of my mentors) and Sebastian Edwards wrote a classic paper on what they called “macroeconomic populism”.
Their motivating examples were inflationary outbreaks under left-wing regimes in Latin America, but it seemed clear that the key issue wasn’t left-wing governance per se; it was, instead, what happens when governments engage in magical thinking.
