Krugman & Co - alguém se irá demitir?

Depois de saírem os números da inflação de 5.2% para o Reino Unido (e 3.9% para os EUA), Krugman escreve no seu blog em Money And Inflation, British Edition:

"Inflation numbers continue to run high in Britain, yet the Bank of England, far from tightening, seems set to do more quantitative easing. Why are they so complacent about the inflation issue? Well, for good reasons:

... [blá, blá, blá]...

Obviously there’s a test here. If people like Adam Posen and yours truly are right, UK inflation will fall off sharply in the near future. If it doesn’t, Adam says he’ll resign from the Monetary Policy Committee; and I’ll certainly have to make a major rethink."

Vamos ver se alguém se demite porque Rothbard teve essa exacta experiência com Arthur Burns, o presidente do FED que provocou a estagflação dos anos 70 (o qual ironicamente bloqueava o Phd "austríaco" de Rothbard em Columbia sobre a crise americana de 1819, só a saída de Burns para um lugar que precedeu o da ida para o FED desbloqueou o seu doutoramento).

Mas Rothbard conta algures como (fins dos anos 60, creio) depois de uma palestra com Burns o questiona: E se estiverem errados, se a expansão monetária conduzir a inflação e recessão simultâneamente? Burns respondeu-lhe que nesse caso tinha de se demitir.

Isso conduziu a uma das máximas de Rothbard: "Ninguém se demite."

Sobre Arthur Burns diz Tom DiLorenzo:

"Arthur Burns, was such a staunch supporter of Richard Nixon that he abandoned his professional credibility by endorsing wage and price controls. Even though Burns's staff advised him that the money supply was forecast to grow by 10.5 percent by the third quarter of 1972, he advocated even faster money creation. The growth rate of the money supply in 1972 was the fastest for any one year since the end of World War II and helped assure Nixon's reelection- and the stagflation that followed."

E Lewrockwell recorda uma pérola da história de banqueiros centrais:

"Arthur Burns, who had blocked Murray Rothbard's hard-money PhD at Columbia until Ike made Burns chairman of the council of economic advisors, also engineered Nixon's great inflation. After his term as Fed chairman, Burns was rewarded by Nixon with the ambassadorship to Germany (...)

Burns--whom Murray described as sounding like W.C. Fields without the humor--answered, the Fed chairman has to do what the president wants, or "the central bank would lose its independence."