THIS IS HARD WORK

Weiting a blog four or five times a week can be really hard work especially if you try to stick to just on topic as I try to do. I would love to comment on politics or sports--I'm an expert on the latter (yeah, sure) but I chose finance and I'm stuck with it. I therefore do have some sympathy for newspaper columnists who MUST produce and MUST produce on deadline but then I read something like Little Paulie Krugman's latest effort in yesterday's NYT and I ask myself does he get paid that much money that its worth making a fool out of one's self?

Paulie's effort was on unemployment, bemoaning that all the politicians around the world have given up on improving the situation. Yesterday, he sinled out the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation ("OECD") for proclaiming what I thought was a self-evident truth that governments are pretty well tapped out when in comes to macro-economic tools to immediately improve things and should rather focus on structural reforms...heard that anywhere around this blog recently?

Now the head hummer at the OECD is a guy named Jose Angel Guerria Trevino who, among other things, served for four years as the Finance Minister of Mexico in the administration of Ernesto Zedillo who, IMHO, was the finest president in the nation's history. Angel is a lot of things but one thing he is not is a dope and in addition to serving as finance minister he also ran the national finance organizayon and the devlopment bank. About jobs and macro economic policy, he has probably forgotten more that Little Paulie knows. None of this matters of course for now the OECD has been lumped with every Republican who ever walked the face of the earth as the root of all evil.

Paulie's idea as to the cause of persistantly high employment is the overhang of private debt==mortgage debt to be precise--which acts as a drag on the economy.