by Calculated Risk on 9/24/2012 06:18:00 PM

This is an excellent followup to Josh Lehner's post (and the graph I posted) earlier today showing that the US recovery is doing better than most recoveries following a financial crisis.

From Tim Duy at EconomistsView: Excuses Not To Do More. Duy discusses Reinhart and Rogoff and excerpts from a piece by Ezra Klein:

...if you look at the leaked memo that the Obama administration was using when they constructed their stimulus, you’ll find, on page 10 and 11, a list of prominent economists the administration consulted as to the proper size for the stimulus package. And there, on page 11, is Rogoff, with a recommendation of “$1 trillion over two years” — which is actually larger than the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. So if they’d been following Rogoff’s advice, the initial stimulus would have been even bigger — not nonexistent.

As for Reinhart, I asked her about this for a retrospective I did on the Obama administration’s economic policy. “The initial policy of monetary and fiscal stimulus really made a huge difference,” she told me. “I would tattoo that on my forehead. The output decline we had was peanuts compared to the output decline we would otherwise have had in a crisis like this. That isn’t fully appreciated.”

Then Duy added this update:

Update: I notice some Twitter chatter of surprise that Rogoff was not completely opposed to fiscal stimulus (I thought everyone read Ezra Klein).

The key point here is that short term stimulus, in a depressed economy, can actually reduce the long term deficit.