Wonkblog has some interesting comments about a Brookings Institution conference from Friday where Bernanke and Paul Krugman presented. I have my reservations about saying Bernanke and Krugman in the same breath but it attempts to summarize what was said.
It could have been remarkable for the rest of us just to learn what Krugman and Bernanke are thinking about one of the most important problems in contemporary macroeconomics [Japanese deflation]. Annoyingly, however, the conference was held under the Chatham House rule, forbidding journalists from attributing anything said in the discussion to the person who said it. For example, one economist in the room opened his remarks by apologizing for his lack of a slide deck. “It’s been a long time since I’ve made PowerPoint slides,” he said. You’ll have to guess who it was. That’s a shame, because the economists in the room said some things that investors and policymakers really ought to hear. What follows is an attempt to disseminate that discussion with a summary based on Krugman and Bernanke’s other research and a separate interview with the authors.
