Saw Paul Krugman last night and I wonder if there is enough money in the world to bail us out

Sobering. And needed. I did learn a few things last night that I want to pass along. One is this...if you can't pay $50 for a lecture....see if the person will be interviewed on your local npr or community station. If they have a book to promote then their spiel will be virtually the same for free over the airwaves. But, you might get some additional remarks "live"...and then there's the social aspect of congregation but I digress....



Mr. Krugman is very connected to Mr. Bernanke as they served at Princeton together. Mr. Krugman said that Mr. Bernanke had been, "...demoted to run the world..." That got some laughs.



But that connection, I hope, has deeper roots. Mr. Krugman can probably affect more change from his position as a Nobel Laureate, Economic Genius and pundit than he could if he were at Treasury. Here are some things he noted that I would guess are being heeded by his former boss:



Temporary nationalization of the Financial sector is probably needed.



We have an "ugly several years..." ahead of us.



We will likely get to "at least 9% unemployment"



If we do not stimulate enough we will have a depression.



and, Only in America...will we see millions more lose health insurance and fall into deep poverty because of the insufficiency of our social safety net.



and on the question of where stimulus money will go...



he said that he thought money would go to municipalities and suggested that maybe investing in Muni's might be a thing to do.



On localized economies he was not as enthusiastice as I would have predicted. He said that on a small scale, and he mentioned "produce" (as in farms), that local revitalization would have some benefits...but that the utter scale of what needs to be done forces global action and that we , "cannot turn back the clock on globalization."



He went further to say that, "a total local economy is not fair to the developing world". He talked about how the developing nations needed global markets to improve.



He also alluded to the lack of manufacturing and product creation in our own society by saying that, "Eventually we need to sell things to China." And he means things other than IOU's. That got a laugh but it probably shouldn't have.



Afterwards I asked Mr. Krugman if he would write about Steady State Economics on his blog. He said he'd try. He seemed pretty darn tired and I guess a book tour will do that to a person.

I was very inspired by the two World Affairs Council awards that were given out to a teacher, Bob Mazelow, and school administrator, Karen Kodama. Their stories about how they bring the world into their classrooms and their students out to the world were quite inspiring.