Krugman vs Ferguson

On Bloomberg last week, I was writing about deflation, and in The Sunday Times yesterday I was writing about the battle between the economist Paul Krugman and the historian Niall Ferguson. What interested me about both pieces was how much of mainstream economics is turning out to be pretty useless at explaining both how the world got into this recesssion, and more importantly how we get out. My own instinct is that the prescriptions of mainstream economics - more stimulus spending, printing money - are going to turn out to be the wrong ones, which is why people are so willing to listen to the few people such as Ferguson willing to challenge the prevailing conventional wisdon.