Professor Krugman’s Just Deserts

As President-elect Trump prepares to take office on a vow to ‘defeat inflation,’ the Nobel laureate of the Times prepares to exit stage left.

White House photo by Adam Schultz via Wikimedia Commons
Paul Krugman with President Biden at the Oval Office on August 14, 2023. White House photo by Adam Schultz via Wikimedia Commons

The retirement of Paul Krugman as a New York Times columnist is cause to lament — in part because it forecloses the prospect of a final reckoning from the Nobel laureate in respect of an honest dollar and the role of the Federal Reserve in America’s crisis of fiat money. For years, Mr. Krugman has served as a kind of bête noire of sound money advocates, mocking their warnings of inflation and denying gold’s role as the basis of monetary value.

Mr. Krugman tended, when faced with criticism of today’s monetary certitudes, to dismiss his opponents out of hand. Such debates, he said, proved that “we aren’t having a rational argument over economic policy.” When the Sun, in an editorial headlined “The Female Dollar,” made light of the Times for dwelling on the gender of the next Fed chief at a time when the dollar’s value in terms of gold had plummeted, Mr. Krugman would have none of it. 

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