Krugman Just Called Ben Bernanke a Wanker

In his New York Times blog.

It was pretty polite, but it was also rather firm:

Here’s the story of two metro areas, Los Angeles (which has run out of room to sprawl) and Atlanta, the ultimate Sprawl City:


Huge bubble in LA; nothing in Atlanta. Looking at the national data was deeply misleading.

So here’s one of the charts from Bernanke’s paper at the meetings:


Yep, he’s using average US housing prices as a bubble indicator. This wouldn’t matter if the division between Flatland and the Zoned Zone was comparable across the advanced world, but it isn’t: other advanced countries lack sprawling metros comparable to Atlanta or Houston. So we aren’t learning much from this comparison.

And the whole thing suggests that the Fed hasn’t learned much about how to identify housing bubbles.

(emphasis mine)

Meow! I whole heartedly approve.