Paul Krugman has already had to walk back his prediction of a global recession following Donald Trump’s presidential victory last night. His initial post on the New York Times’ website was confidently apocalyptic about the prospects of Donald Trump plunging the world into a depression: “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”
He concluded by saying, “So we are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight. I suppose we could get lucky somehow. But on economics, as on everything else, a terrible thing has just happened.”
Markets rebounded in the morning after an overnight selloff, and it became clear that Krugman was wrong yet again on the one thing he is actually qualified to write about, economics. This morning he went on a mini tweetstorm about his moral philosophy — centering on the death of the “American romance” that he believed in before his party lost this election — and his only tweet about economics rescinded his previous projection:
Having some second thoughts about my global recession call. As with Brexit, the short-run case isn't that clear. Still a disaster
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) November 9, 2016
It looks like economic Armageddon will not be arriving on schedule.