White House spokesman Jay Carney is getting some flak for saying that no one knew in early 2009 just how bad the economy was going to get. And he's right. Alexander Eichler at HuffPo says this isn't true, and cites several examples. But the examples Eichler cites simply say that things were going to get a lot worse (true), and that the stimulus wasn't nearly enough (true). But it's also true that no one was talking about unemployment going as high as it did. Even Krugman, circa February of 2009:
As for unemployment, Krugman is predicting it will peak around 9% sometime later this year. There is a chance unemployment could reach the double digits, however, if the crisis continues to spread rapidly across the globe.A chance. But he expected 9%, not the 10% that we got.
The recession was far worse than anyone expected at the time - that doesn't mean it wasn't expected to be just awful. There's a difference. Carney is right on this one. Though, the administration should have known that its stimulus wasn't big enough for even the projections at the time. Krugman explains that too, and he was right.
