Cochrane’s heaviest punching is reserved for Krugman’s support for President Barack Obama’s fiscal stimulus. He invokes the hoary old “Ricardian equivalence theorem,” revived by the Harvard economist Robert Barro, according to whom “debt-financed spending can’t have any effect, because people, seeing the higher future taxes that must pay off the debt, will simply save more.
但科克伦也指出，这也是一种理论的虚无主义，不能将所有这些价格过度波动都归咎于克鲁格曼所认为的“非理性”。克鲁格曼真正的目的（当然他不能明着说）是让政府“接管所有的资本”。但有一件事情我们是清楚的，那就是虽然资产市场表现糟糕，但政府的接管只能会把问题弄得更糟。