Wednesday morning at 12:42 a.m., as it was becoming clear that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump was on the verge of officially defeating Democrat Hillary Clinton for the presidency, Paul Krugman at the New York Times noted at the paper's election night live blog that the "markets are plunging." He then wrote: "If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never."
You might want to try a second pass, Paul. On Thursday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit all-time intraday and closing highs.
Clay Waters chronicled Krugman's Twitter overnight meltdown in a mid-morning Wednesday NewsBusters post. Krugman's tweeted commentary was primarily about noneconomic matters with which he clearly has no expertise, blaming "prejudice and misogyny" for the result (the truth: "the gravity of this turning point for our country superseded ... concerns about Trump’s flaws"), while claiming that Trump could only win North Carolina by suppressing the black vote (overall 2016 Tar Heel State turnout of 4.7 million was about 4 percent higher than in 2012).
Krugman graced readers at the Times post with the following not so sage investment advice early Wednesday:
Thursday on Twitter, Krugman posted a peripherally-related walkback:
Having some second thoughts about my global recession call. As with Brexit, the short-run case isn't that clear. Still a disaster.
I haven't been able to find any evidence that Krugman has had any "second thoughts" about his "the markets will never recover" prediction. The guess here is that he'll pretend that he never wrote it — or if he gets called on it, that he amended his thoughts, but felt no need to revise his posted prediction.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
