Nighttime Must-Read: Paul Krugman: Quantitative Easing and Monetary Aggregates

…say that it’s not their fault–who could have known that banks would just sit on all those reserves? The answer is, anyone who had paid attention…. Let me quote myself, from… 1998…. Data from the 1930s… seemed to confirm…. Japan gave us another experiment, when it tried quantitative easing…. Theory and experience both predicted exactly the sterility of monetary base expansion that we saw in practice. And, you know, that’s the kind of successful prediction that is supposed to change peoples’ minds: if you’re that wrong about how an experiment turned out, and someone else made a prediction you considered foolish but turned out completely right, you’re supposed to concede that just maybe, possibly, they were on to something. The fact that essentially nobody on that side of the debate has budged in the slightest tells us that whatever it is they’ve been doing, it’s not scientific research.