Matthew C Klein, Columnist

Who Should Bear the Pain?

When things go wrong, someone has to pay. But who?

May 24, 2013 at 1:59 PM UTC

Matthew C. Klein writes for Bloomberg View about the economy and financial markets. He previously wrote for the Economist magazine and its economics blog, Free Exchange. Before that, Klein was a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he spent more than two years studying the history of the Federal Reserve and the intellectual history of monetary economics for an upcoming book by Sebastian Mallaby. He also worked at Bridgewater Associates, where he studied the economies of Central and Eastern Europe and advised institutional investors on asset-liability management. Klein has a bachelor's degree in history from Yale University. Originally from Chicago, he lives in New York.

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Michael Kinsley has received a great deal of grief for an essay in The New Republic about fiscal policy. The piece was predicated on a mistaken set of beliefs about the nature of government debt that have been rightly criticized. However, several people have overreacted to this passage:

I fail to see why this sentiment is controversial, yet Felix Salmon, in an otherwise reasonable post, recently wrote that "the view that 'we have to pay a price for past sins' is nearly always wrong." I'm not sure what he could mean by this. Is Salmon really denying that bad decisions often have unpleasant consequences?