A Talk With Dean Baker: "We Really Need Much More Stimulus"

By Leo Gerard

Created 03/04/2009 - 9:46am

Summary:

I ask the economist who has just released a new book on the collapse of the "bubble economy" how he saw the crash coming when few others did, and what more the Obama administration and Congress should do to shop the economic free fall.

Leo W. Gerard: Economist James K. Galbraith, the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations at the University of Texas, recently told Deborah Solomon of the New York Times that you are “the person with the most serious claim” for predicting the onslaught of the current credit disaster.
The promo for your most recent book, "Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy" (PoliPoint Press, 2009), says the fall of the bubble economy was “completely predictable.” But you were standing nearly alone out there for some time yelling, “The collapse is coming, the collapse is coming.”

When did you get the first inkling that the collapse was impending and what did that feel like?