Krugman: "...failing to engineer recovery"

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2010/02/the-trillion-dollar-gap.html

It’s crucial to realize that the trillion dollars’ worth of goods and services we could have produced this year, but won’t, is a loss we’ll never make up. And that doesn’t count the suffering and damage to our future inflicted by the non-monetary costs of mass long-term unemployment.

And yet, the prevailing sentiment in Washington and other centers of power is that we’ve done enough, and that it’s time to start pulling back — to normalize monetary policy, tighten our fiscal belts. Policymakers are congratulating themselves for avoiding total collapse, when they should be berating themselves for failing to engineer recovery.

It’s tragic.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/a-great-failure/