How Policymakers Respond to Financial Crisis (w/ Paul Krugman & Vincent Catalano)

Video Transcription:

  How Policymakers Respond to Financial Crisis (w/ Paul Krugman & Vincent Catalano)

VINCENT CATALANO: My guest today has been called the Mick Jagger of political and economic punditry. I wonder if that means he can't get no satisfaction. Paul Krugman of the Nobel Laureate and political commentator on matters political and economic is here to share his thoughts and insights on these most extraordinary of times, and also to discuss his most recent book, Arguing with Zombies, Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future. I am most pleased to have Professor Krugman here today. Paul, welcome. PAUL KRUGMAN: Hi there. VINCENT CATALANO: Hi there. Okay, let's start off with zombies for a moment and for those that don't know or might be somewhat unfamiliar with your work, just give us the definition of a zombie. Because I assume you're not talking about the '60s band, and I assume you're not talking about the walking dead. You're talking about policies that just seem to never want to die. PAUL KRUGMAN: A zombie idea is an idea that should be dead because it's been proved wrong, and it's been tried against experience, we have the evidence it should have died long ago, but it just keeps on going. It shambles along and eats people's brains. Something like the idea of cutting taxes pays for itself because of the wonderful things that does. A lot of our economic discussion in the United States and some other areas as well, but economics with those others folks and is not actually between, there's one group of reasonable people who think this and there's another group of reasonable people who think that, it's between what every reasonable person knows, and the zombie idea that refuses to die. VINCENT CATALANO: Well, one of the zombie ideas that you have in your book deals with the fear of deficit spending, and in these times, it would seem to me that we're about to get a boatload of deficit spending. Your thoughts on that? PAUL KRUGMAN: No problem. It should do it well, and it should never completely ignore deficits, but there's absolutely no reason to worry. For the United States, for the countries of Western Europe, for Japan, none of us-- we're all able to borrow money, extremely low interest rates, there's no hint of a problem. Markets are basically begging us to borrow money and now, we have a whole bunch of urgent needs to spend both directly to fight this pandemic and also to insulate our economies from the economic fallout. If we react to this the way that a lot of countries reacted to the financial crisis which was to get all frantic about budget deficits, we can turn what is already going to be a human catastrophe into an economic catastrophe as well. VINCENT CATALANO: During the Great Depression, they weren't able to engage deficit spending at that point with public works programs. If we can't work together, if we can't be in physical proximity to one another, what would you recommend would be the most effective approach in this environment right now in terms of the deficit spending, and the programs that they might institute because we can have public works programs? PAUL KRUGMAN: Well, in fact, construction will probably continue, but in any case, what we need right now, when this thing is unfolding with incredible speed, that's terrifying speed, it makes the financial crisis of 2008 look slow. You need stuff that can happen right away. The trouble with building new railroad tunnels and things like that is that those projects take years to reach peak spending. We should be doing them anyway but right now you need stuff that has very quick effect. The two big things are just plain give people cash, we can get probably some cash to everybody and we can give people who are especially hard hit by this thing extra cash and give state and local governments in the US which have balanced budget restrictions, who are themselves find themselves cash strapped. They can get aid from the federal government. At this point, it's really not about starting public works, it's about giving people money. VINCENT CATALANO: What about the Ben Bernanke era, thought about helicopter drops? PAUL KRUGMAN: People I think are a little confused by what helicopter drops, if the audience doesn't know this. It's actually something that came from Milton Friedman, who talked about sending a helicopter out to drop money on people's heads and as a thought experiment. The Federal Reserve, its counterparts are thinking just create money with a new way, they say a stroke of the pen, now it's with the click of a mouse. Anyway, they create money out of thin air, but people treat it as real money. The thing is, though, that they don't actually have the power to just give people money. All they can do is buy assets. When the Fed bails out banks, it does it by buying assets from the banks and I don't think legally they have the right to just plain drop money on people's heads. If we ask the question, if Congress votes to give people money, where's the money going to come from? Well, you don't actually have to sell bonds if the Fed can supply that money to you or you can sell the bonds to the Fed, which is just another arm of the government. Helicopter money is a fiscal thing. It's strictly speaking within the realm of things that only Congress has the right to do, but it can be financed by the Fed. You can't ask Jay Powell to do this on his own. I don't think that the law will allow him to. If Jay Powell and Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump get together to do it, there's no problem. We can start it tomorrow. VINCENT CATALANO: Then, from a technical point of view, do we have to wait for two quarters to demonstrate that we are technically in a recession, or is it fair to say all indications are boom, we're there? PAUL KRUGMAN: Actually, the US doesn't even use the two-quarter definition. The US defines recessions, it's a recession if the recession dating committee says it's a recession and the recession dating committee looks at a bunch of stuff but at this point, look, we have the real world, first of all, just look around you. Companies are laying off thousand people, and then the early wave, the bleeding edge of the economic data, the manufacturing surveys, unemployment claims, they're all say it's a tsunami. If you wait for more evidence like well, geez, it's fine. The ocean's level has dropped out there. I wonder if something's about to happen. Now, there is a giant wave hitting this way and everybody knows it. VINCENT CATALANO: One of the other zombies in your book deals with tax cuts. One of the thoughts that's being bandied about as a solution is tax cuts. Is there a way to balance that businesses are going to need some help, small businesses will need help, et cetera, how would you strike that balance? PAUL KRUGMAN: Some businesses may need help, but then if you want to help people, give them help. There's no particular reason. If you do any across the board cut in taxes, the question is, is that directing money to the people who need to help most? By and large, people who are going to be paying the most taxes are going to be the ones who need the help least. Worried about that millions of people are going to lose their job if you cut the Social Security tax, that doesn't do anything for somebody who isn't earning any money. I won't say the tax cuts never have a role here but there's hard to come up with any reason why that should be if we're going to be trying to direct money to people, why two or three tax cuts except because it fits an ideology which had said the tax cuts are the magical answer to everything? VINCENT CATALANO: Understood. One of the other zombies deals with austerity. I think it's fair to say that's the zombie that is there going to be at least asleep for a while, would you say? PAUL KRUGMAN: That's an interesting question. The idea that the government should tighten its belt in hard times because that's what people do, is that is a zombie. It never dies. It always comes back at some places more than others. I wouldn't count on it. In the United States, I think it's not an issue right now. I think the Republicans never actually believed in austerity, they only believed in hobbling democratic presidents, but in Europe, they failed to reach an agreement on any Europe wide stimulus. In a way, the problem with austerity in America was a problem because Republicans pretended to believe and that in Europe, it's a problem because the Germans actually do believe in it. Unfortunately, I think they still do even at the time of pandemic. VINCENT CATALANO: Even now. PAUL KRUGMAN: Even now. Even now, they're saying oh, we're going to do some stimulus, but you actually look at it and it's ridiculously tiny, not remotely up to so we have a real problem. The two biggest obstacles to seeing economic policy right now are let's let people on the Republican Party in the United States and the entire nation of Germany. VINCENT CATALANO: Who should take the lead then do your think in Europe? Clearly, there's got to be some leadership, some aspect of that, correct? PAUL KRUGMAN: Well, yeah. The question is Europe is a real leadership gap. There are no individuals who have the stature, Angela Merkel still has considerable personal stature, but she's never used it on economics. Nobody else, the French are talking more sense than the Germans are, but not clear that they have the weight in the European Union. This is a case when the British might be helpful, but they just left so I'm not sure who's going to do this. It's down. We have a definite date. We are approaching this this crisis. It's even worse. In 2008, we had problems. We had some weak leadership in some places, and there are a lot of but compare the people particularly not just at the highest level, but a couple of levels down, finance ministers around the world, compared with a dozen years ago. It's like we've become an inferior race of human beings. We just have a really, really poor collection of people in charge now. VINCENT CATALANO: Are you concerned about a feedback loop because it is a global economy? Okay, and if Europe really doesn't do enough of the things that they really should do, then could we have that feedback loop between Europe and the United States and the world economy because they're not stepping up enough? PAUL KRUGMAN: Yeah, I know some of those things are a little bit weaker than people imagine. When all is said and done, US sends about 2% of what we make to Europe and the Europeans send them maybe 2.5% of what they make to us. It's not as if there's a tremendous amount of direct market linkage. There's some and there's a lot of psychological spillover and financial spillover, too. If Europe slides into a recession, which was actually I think it's everyone's sliding to a recession, all of these things. The Chinese are-- we think of China only as a competitor, but it's also a market. China appears to have had its first economic contraction, literal fall in GDP since the Cultural Revolution. There's a lot of global feedback going along. Each of us is messing up individually, but collectively, we're making it even worse. VINCENT CATALANO: One more zombie to deal with, and that deals with the economy, excuse me, with the environment, and regulation, bad and government is the problem and so on and so forth. Is that a zombie that at least for now, for the moment, there's going to be like, put aside or ignored? How do you see that playing into the role of where we are right now? PAUL KRUGMAN: Yeah, we were doing nothing about it a month ago, and we will continue doing nothing about it for the next couple of months. I hope that it'll come back. In the end, it's the most important issue out there. Climate change denial is literally, everything else is bad, but that's existential. We're putting the future civilization on the line. We seem to be making some progress under Obama and then that fall apart. Now, we'll see. I think, really realistically if the political power changes hands in the United States, we have a new administration that once again takes the climate threat seriously, then I'm all for a Green New Deal. VINCENT CATALANO: That's what I was going to ask you, too. PAUL KRUGMAN: Nobody could notice quite what Green New Deal means, which is a great advantage. Green New Deal would be [indiscernible]. We'd be doing investing in lots of stuff, we'd be investing in infrastructure, we'd be investing in energy, technology. We would do no doubt some taxes on emissions, put a grab bag of stuff, have a lot of goodies for lots of people, because that's how you get something done politically. Above all, just act. I'm hoping that-- Times columnist, I'm not allowed to do endorsements but let me say I look forward to February 2021, when the Biden administration unveiled the enormous environmental program. VINCENT CATALANO: Yeah, maybe that'll tie in at that point, and then we'll see where we're at economically. PAUL KRUGMAN: Yeah, that's right. Economically, who knows? It's all of these things. The world is already-- sometimes, it makes sense to just calm down but right now, the world is already a completely different looking place than it was just a month and a half ago. VINCENT CATALANO: Can monetary policy ever be not political? They said the Fed should be independent, et cetera, but monetary policy is going to have an influencing factor on the political environment. How is it not, let's say, in a worst-case scenario, would be backstopping bad behavior? PAUL KRUGMAN: Yeah, that's people-- I know people who worry about that, that central banks are going to encourage politicians to be irresponsible. Have you seen any of that? The reality, it's funny because the modern idea of the independent central bank, the modern idea which Ben Bernanke or even Mario Draghi is a superstar independent to the political process, that's a new thing. It was created over because people feared that governments would be inflationary, which has not been the problem actually, in recent years and basically anywhere except Venezuela. As it's turned out, those independent central bankers have been good guys. Bernanke helped hold things together in America. In Europe, Mario Draghi saved the euro by backstopping that sovereign debt. He said, whatever it takes, and that ended a run, a panic attack that almost sank the whole euro. At the moment, it seems to be a system that's working well. Particularly, I guess, maybe you could say that the Fed and the European central banker appeared to be a lot less zombie infested than other parts of the power structure on both sides of the Atlantic. VINCENT CATALANO: Where does income inequality fit within the context of everything that's going on now? I would imagine that when you have massive deficits then start to come about because of the programs that are instituted, where's the money going to come from, so on and so forth and inequality and exacerbated? PAUL KRUGMAN: I think in terms of where the money's going to come from, it's really this, first, it's not a problem. We live in a world which is awash in savings with no place to go. People want to save. Businesses don't want to invest that much. That's why interest rates are so low and just not a problem. You can borrow the money. Income inequality, there's probably some, there's some economic problems that made worse and other things, too. Part of our problem with the pandemic is that there are lots of people without health insurance, who can't afford to stay home from work and so on, all of that. The real thing, it turns up by zombies theme is most, not all, but most of the zombies, what keeps them up, with keeps them alive is actually money from billionaires. Climate change denial is almost entirely something that is sustained by fossil fuel billionaires. Tax cuts zombie is entirely sustained by right wing, hired guns propagandists, because rich people like to disseminate the idea that cutting taxes on rich people is good for the economy. VINCENT CATALANO: Some policies, let's say we go through this valley, economic valley. What does it look like? It's difficult to know but what would you imagine it looks like three months, six months down the road where we are at? Business as usual, because a lot of investors are going to look at this from the point of view of what does it mean for earnings? PAUL KRUGMAN: Well, a lot of us, the way I've been putting it for a while, is that I didn't know where the next bump in the road was going to come from, but that our shock absorbers were shocked, that we had no good way to respond. That was always hard to get people's attention about because we hadn't hit the bump yet. Now, everybody can see it. Now, everybody's out there looking in, and seeing how hard it is for us to respond and maybe, maybe we get a change in mindset. I'd like to imagine that we come out of this with a renewed appreciation for the fact that there are some jobs we do need the government to do, that we see the government cope with a public health crisis and also with the economic fallout from that crisis and people say oh, yeah maybe the New Deal idea made sense. Maybe FDR knew what he was talking about and maybe John Maynard Keynes knew what he was talking about and that we come out. I think businesses, stock market predictions are a mug's game, and I've been the mug myself, so I know better than that. I will say that it does, a lot of assets until just a few weeks ago, were priced as if nothing bad would ever happen again. Something bad always does happen and here we go. VINCENT CATALANO: Sure. In a larger context, neoliberalism, and let's use that as an economic theory since Hayek, Friedman, 1980, political change takes place with Reagan and Thatcher, et cetera. Do you think that now, we're going to see a shift in that to another economic ideology that that takes hold? PAUL KRUGMAN: Well, it's [indiscernible], I think neoliberalism is a useful term. It's less than economic theory than an attitude. It's private sector, good government, bad except in very exceptional circumstances. It should take a hit that we should have a much more expansive view of the role of the government. Of course, that should have happened after the financial crisis too, and didn't have nearly as much as I thought it would. Maybe we go through this one as well. Although a lot of what goes on, I do talk about this in arguing with zombies. A lot of what goes on in political economy of this stuff is that conservatives tend to oppose even government programs that don't obviously hurt rich people, because they fear this big halo effect. If people see that government action is effective in one area, they tend to become more sympathetic towards government action and other and to the extent that I think they're right about that, and so the neoliberal attitude because that's really what it is. It's more of an attitude than a theory, the neoliberal attitude has got to take a hit from this. We've just seen that. Why was Donald Trump spending weeks pretending that there was no real threat? Because he was afraid that if people did think there was a threat, they would demand the government action that he doesn't want to do. Now, he's being forced into at least something. I think that's an omen for the future. VINCENT CATALANO: Do you think that after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and great recession and all that, that there should have been more pain, more punishment [indiscernible] that about some should have been taken to task banks, et cetera. Now, we can't really point to someone other than I heard the criticism of United Airlines and stock buybacks and that type of thing. Now, they need money. PAUL KRUGMAN: I wanted to temporarily nationalize, take into receivership a couple of big banks, because we knew that those banks were surviving only because people were assuming that they were going to be bailed out, or they actually were bailed out. In the end, the government didn't lose much money in doing so but that we didn't know that at the time. It was clear that the option of the prospect of a bailout was the only reason their stock was worth anything. I thought that the government should have said look, you exist only because we're there to support you. There's no reason why stockholders should come out of this with any money left and there's no reason why current management should remain in place. That's why I wanted to see the government take a couple banks under receivership partly just as a little bit of justice and a little bit to encourage the others, as Napoleon would have said, and just for the public to see that some justice was done. I tried to make that case, there was actually among some of us now infamous lunch of economists with President Obama in which we failed to convince him of that. It's also true that was legally a little bit difficult. Actually, the law makes it easier to do that now than it did it did then. We should have done something and right now, if we're going to be bailing out the airlines, we should not be bailing out airline stockholders. If you want to keep-- I personally use United a lot. I'd like to see United remain a viable business entity, but I don't see why United stockholders should get anything out of this. VINCENT CATALANO: How do we expect the balance then in terms of the programs? You had the infamous lunch, as you said, from a while back. Now, you're in another lunch. You're there and you're there with Steve Mnuchin and others and you're engaging the conversation. What's the advantage that they're hearing from you? PAUL KRUGMAN: Yeah, that lunch is not going to happen but I would say at the same time, I'm reasonably sure, actually, that we can use the authority created by the Dodd Frank financial reform bill to in effect, it's a nationalized, but it's not really-- nobody wants the government to be running businesses on a sustained basis but we do, I believe, have the ability to do what effectively was done with the auto companies. The federal government got for a while controlling stake in the auto companies, it never tried to take over the business of building autos, but it kept the auto companies in business while making sure that taxpayers were not-- you don't want to socialize the losses and privatized the profits. That's where we are right now. We are probably going to have to rescue some airlines. Some other but what remains to be seen, but if we do, then we should just do so in a way that is not rewarding bad behavior. You don't want to be rewarding on an airline company for having used all of its profits to buy back stocks during the good years. VINCENT CATALANO: Is there anything in history that we can point to, to look at to say, okay, you've had this hit, and this hit is a relatively, let's say relatively short period of time, months. It's powerful and dramatic, just like the stock market showed with the plunge in yields so you get the economic, Goldman Sachs has got numbers for first quarter and second quarter and really to the downside. Now, we come through the valleys, so almost like a Passover period. Stay indoors, everything would pass over us. Do we have anything in history that we can point to economically that will give us some sense of how this works out? PAUL KRUGMAN: There's actually there's a problem. A lot of actual interesting, if slightly grim discussion going on among economists on this, there's two models. Sometimes, the closest thing we've had to this sudden onset, maybe has been we've had recessions that were generated because we had inflation and the Fed put the economy through shock therapy. After those, we have what everybody calls a V-shaped recession, the economy went plunging and then went zooming back up again. One argument that says that this is not because there are underlying imbalances. This is not like the housing bubble or something where people had run up too much debt and there's all that. Once the virus threat recedes, then the economy will come roaring back. I guess that's what everybody's hoping for. The one concern that some people have, and I actually don't know which of these stories is true, the other possibility is that we actually were building up structural problems, but they were concealed by all of the optimism and that corporate debt had been rising, emerging market debt had been rising, student loan debt had been rising. Then it's when the house falls down, you find the skeletons in the closet that there'll be that-- VINCENT CATALANO: The water goes out and you see who's not wearing trunks. PAUL KRUGMAN: Yeah. There's some possibility of that. I don't expect this one. I don't think this is going to be like 2008 where it took seven years to get back to anything that resembled full employment. That shouldn't be that kind of thing. Whether everything will look fine a year from now is much more doubtful. VINCENT CATALANO: U-shape, more U-shape rather than V-shape in other words, because when you have that peaking, if you're looking at the projections of the infections and everything else, you've got a peaking but they-- PAUL KRUGMAN: I've seen it. That Goldman forecast is one which is a-- I'm sorry, yeah, the virus is supposed to follow this hump shaped and actually everything depends on how high the hump is, whether it overloads our hospitals or not. The economy, yeah, most of those forecasts, which are terrifying economic descent in the next few months, call for rapid recovery late this year. They don't know that, that's one possible scenario. Honestly, I don't know. If I had to take a picture of it, what I would do is draw a V and then a much shallower, longer U on top of it, and then step back away and take off my glasses and get a blurry picture, either one of them could be true. We really don't know. This is albeit cliché, but uncharted territory. We really have never seen anything like this before. VINCENT CATALANO: Right, exactly. Who was the person that you admire, and why? PAUL KRUGMAN: Among economists, we all have our sub thing, who I know a little bit professionally but Bob Solow, Robert Solow of MIT who was my colleague during the years I was there, and has always been my model for being first of all, just a great economist but more than that, just an incredibly balanced human being that just that the humanity, sense of good humor shines through even this technical paper. There's somebody that I really, really admire and he's in his 90s now is still going strong and I hope that I can be like that. Actually, who I enormously admire in political life is in fact, Nancy Pelosi. That combination, actually I've interviewed her, I've done your roll with her and you'd never know it but she's actually not as sharp as a tack but she's a riot. She's hilarious and but her ability to stay focused and we wouldn't have had Obamacare without her. The only sense we have gotten right now is in governance, is coming from her and have intellectual sets to be a woman and to be doing that is really amazing. Those were the probably the two people that come to mind right now. VINCENT CATALANO: What is the bulk of books that have changed how you view the world, and how so? What are you reading right now? PAUL KRUGMAN: I see. When I was a teenager, I read Isaac Asimov's foundation science fiction novels, which were about mathematical social scientists who saved civilization. At some level, that's where I wanted to be. I was hugely influenced. I took one philosophy course in college and I've read David Hume about skepticism. Basically, the question is how do you know? Do you know what you know? That has had a tremendous influence on me just in terms of they don't take things on faith, you ask yourself, where does it come from and that had a really lasting influence. It was only much later on I learned that David Hume probably brought the first thing that we would consider economics in the modern sense even before Adam Smith so he wrote a piece called, On the Balance of Trade in the 1750s, which is the beginning of economics as we know it now. John Maynard Keynes, John Maynard Keynes' General Theory of Employment Interest and Money is not recommended as light reading. It's difficult and a little bit torture even for a professional, but you do get a sense of what it really is to think through and to think different. They all think different but that becomes a slogan, in fact, but he really did and that was reading that. I think in some ways, it wasn't until I was in my 50s so I could properly understand what he was getting at, what it took to write that book. What I'm reading now is I mix a lot of nerdy, silly stuff. I'm reading NK Jemisin's Science Fiction, and I just finished re-watching Season Two of Westworld so I can start watching the new season, and history. Just I'm slowly working my way through William Dalrymple's The Anarchy, which is about the rise of the East India Company, which is just fascinating. Again, the history is full of, I'm not sure what the direct lessons are, but it's just wow. There's a lot of history out there. VINCENT CATALANO: Is there one person, dead or living, you would want to interview more than anyone else? If so, who and why? PAUL KRUGMAN: I would love to interview Julius Caesar, believe it or not, not because of I admire his conquests and all of that, but because what really comes through in everything you read about him and everything, even in his own writing, is that this was somebody who was just way more seems to have been ahead of or outside of his time. He clearly had a level of have self-awareness and ability to weirdly speaking for somebody who conquered the world, he clearly had his ego under control and he's like, well, Cicero, you fought with my enemies, but on the other hand, you are a great orator so I'm going to spare you and let you continue to supply glory to Roman culture so that rather weirdly, I'd like to meet Julius Caesar though preferably unarmed. VINCENT CATALANO: I think that that's a great person. Really, really unique. This next question reminds me of when Jerry Seinfeld talks about the moment before he was on a Tonight Show and then after. There was like a before and after. Here's this next question to you. Some of our guests can tie their success to one key breakthrough. Did you experience a tipping point in your career? PAUL KRUGMAN: Oh, yeah, I did. It's a long ways back. I was 26 years old. I wrote by the breakthrough paper in the work that eventually got me the Nobel Prize, and there was literally-- the way economics works is that stuff gets presented at seminars. You have 90 minutes. You have a paper, you do a presentation, you're barraged with questions. I did a 90-minute presentation in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the Summer Institute at the National Bureau of Economic Research and my life changed. Everyone said, oh, that's a guy with interesting ideas. All of a sudden, that was it. I made that transition from being just another hopeful to being somebody who was taken seriously inside the profession. VINCENT CATALANO: That's separately before and after. Last question, and I think this is such fun because of the one word in this following sentence. What view do you hold that is most controversial in your professional life? PAUL KRUGMAN: Oh, my professional life. Oh, well, it depends. I've had two professional lives. Let's talk about-- see, as a professional economists, I'm probably embarrassingly mainstream, I think largely because of the things I did have that might have seemed radical once upon a time are now mainstream. In my punditry role, I think, being when I say actually in argument with zombies, I talk about being honest about dishonesty, and being willing to talk about motives. Because so much of my time is spent arguing against zombies, I find that it's important to say, look, the people making this argument here are not being honest. This is not a good faith discussion we're having, and I'm doing a disservice to the readers and if I pretend otherwise, even though journalistic conventions aren't, they always try to be nice and give benefit of the doubt, there comes a point when there's no doubt to give benefit to and you just have to say that and you then say, if these people are lying all the time, again, to be honest to readers, you have to say why. You have to say, look, these ideas are sustained entirely by a network of right-wing billionaires or core something like that. The willingness, I don't think I ever engage in personal insults, but my willingness to be rather blunt about what it is I'm arguing with is something that I know a lot of other people in the opinion world find distasteful. They prefer that gentlemanly demeanor, and I say that that's again, that's just not being fair to the readers. VINCENT CATALANO: There's three ways to communicate, subtle, direct and blunt. PAUL KRUGMAN: Yeah, and maybe a little bit below-- yeah, blunt. Blunt is what I do. I can turn it off. I've written a government-- I spent a year in the US government, and I was very good at euphemisms there if necessary. I can't be, but most of the time, I think it's inappropriate. VINCENT CATALANO: Excellent. We'll see how it all works out. Well, everybody, wishes everyone remain safe. Social distancing is what you got to do. That makes all the sense in the world and I think that your comments today will help our viewers quite a bit, quite a bit. The book is called, Arguing with Zombies, Economics, Politics and the Fight for a Better Future. This has been wonderful, and if you're not reading Paul Krugman's statements, and if you're not going on YouTube to listen to what he has to say, and even if you don't agree with his points of view, he's a great teacher. This is a man that you really want to listen to. I have found him over the years to be tremendously helpful and an absolutely fantastic educator, even if I'm not going to CUNY or Princeton before that, et cetera. Paul, this has been wonderful. Thanks so much. PAUL KRUGMAN: Okay, thank you. JUSTINE: If you're ready to go beyond the interview make sure you visit realvision.com where you can try real vision plus for 30 days for just $1. We'll see you next time right here on real vision.