Paul Krugman

After twenty-five years at the New York Times, Krugman explained that his departure in late 2024 resulted partly from a change in editorial culture: increasingly frequent rewrites, softening of his tone and what he regarded as pressure towards a form of false balance. The Columbia Journalism Review reported these complaints in 2025.

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Directly implicated

In October 2023, Krugman wrote that the 'war on inflation' had effectively been won at little macroeconomic cost, illustrating his argument with a twelve-month measure excluding food, energy, housing and used cars. Choosing an indicator that excluded several important components provoked criticism and mockery of a measure seemingly designed to produce low inflation.

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Krugman belonged to the camp arguing in 2021 that US inflation linked to reopening and supply constraints would be relatively transitory. When inflation persisted and intensified, he publicly acknowledged that he had been wrong and had underestimated both capacity constraints and the impact of new shocks, including Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

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Admitted by the person

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Directly implicated

Krugman popularised the expression 'leprechaun economics' to describe the spectacular rise in Irish GDP caused by multinational companies transferring assets. In 2021, Ireland's ambassador to the United States denounced the term as insulting and stereotypical, particularly when applied to the entire country.

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In the hours following Donald Trump's election, Krugman wrote that the market reaction probably indicated a global recession and that a sustained recovery might be very far off. US markets instead rebounded rapidly, and the economy did not enter the global recession he had predicted at that time.

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Krugman described Bitcoin as a system whose value was difficult to justify, emphasising volatility, mining costs and the absence of state backing. Technology specialists criticised him for treating Bitcoin solely as a currency or store of value and underestimating the potential value of a payment network without intermediaries.

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Directly implicated

On 11 September 2011, Krugman published a very short blog post arguing that figures such as Rudy Giuliani and George W. Bush had exploited the attacks politically and that the Iraq War had been sold on false pretences. The post, which initially disabled comments, provoked strong criticism from the right and also from some non-conservative commentators.

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A 2002 quotation from Krugman stating that Alan Greenspan needed to 'create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble' was frequently invoked after the financial crisis as evidence that he had called for inflating the housing market. Liberal and libertarian critics disagreed over the phrase's precise meaning.

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In a 1998 contribution discussing predictions for the following decades, Paul Krugman wrote that by around 2005, the internet's impact on the economy might be no greater than that of the fax machine. The prediction became one of the most frequently cited examples of a spectacular error in technological forecasting.

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Directly implicated

Krugman served on an Enron advisory board and received approximately 50,000 dollars for one year, including two meetings. Following the company's fraudulent collapse, this relationship was used to question his independence as an economic commentator and critic of the Bush administration.

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