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• Monday, March 30, 2009 08:32 PM

  Josie, your facts on Krugman and Enron are...myths.

  Sorry Josie, but that post about Krugman and Enron sounds like a Republican talking point that has now been latched onto by Obama partisans. In either case, the idea that Krugman played any role at Enron where he might have even been in a position to see what was coming is an idea as bankrupt as Enron itself.

  See http://www.pkarchive.org/personal/EnronFAQ.html or click my sig. From the link:

  To make it easier for anyone who is still interested in this story to get the facts right, here are some frequently asked questions about my role on the Enron advisory board, with answers.
  
  

  1. What did I do? In early 1999 I was asked to serve on a panel that offered Enron executives briefings on economic and political issues. As far as I knew at the time, they genuinely wanted to learn something. I resigned from that board in the fall of 1999, when I accepted an offer to write for the New York Times.

  2. What was I paid? It turns out that I was actually paid $37,500 - the last quarterly payment did not take place, because of my early resignation from the board.

  3. Was this exorbitant? It didn't seem so at the time. In 1998-1999 my normal fee for a one-hour business speech in Boston or New York was $20,000 - more if the speech involved long-distance travel. The Enron board required that I spend 4 days in Houston. So the sum they offered didn't seem out of line - if anything it seemed rather low compared with my usual rates.

  4. Was I being paid off because I was a journalist? That Enron board, when I was on it, did not strike me as a board of pundits. It included Larry Lindsey and Bob Zoellick - future Bush administration officials, though I had no way of knowing that, but certainly not journalists. It also included Pankaj Ghemawat, a strategy professor at Harvard, and Irwin Stelzer, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute. (Stelzer had a column in the London Times, but I didn't know that) The only person there I thought of as a journalist was William Kristol - I thought he was there to regale us with Washington gossip. And I regarded myself as being in the same category as Ghemawat - an academic expert, who was there because of his expertise.

  An amazing number of people seem to think that I was paid by Enron while working for the Times. I wasn't - when Enron approached me there was no hint that a Times connection lay in my future. As soon as I shook hands with the Times, I resigned from that board.

  I did write monthly columns for two magazines in 1999, but I would not have described myself as a journalist - no more so than, say, Laura Tyson, Robert Barro, or or Gary Becker, respected economists who write monthly columns for Business Week. I wrote a monthly column for Fortune; that column was neither a major commitment of time nor a major source of income. I also wrote a monthly column, for very little money, for Slate. My main sources of income were teaching, consulting, and business speaking.

  5. Did I disclose my connection? Yes. I reported it the one time I mentioned Enron in Fortune, almost three years ago. I reported it again the first time I mentioned Enron in the New York Times, in a highly critical article more than a year ago. I didn't say that I was paid to serve on the board, but I thought that was obvious: who volunteers his services to for-profit corporations?

  One point that seems to have been missed in all the mud-slinging: I was the only member of the board to declare my connection voluntarily. Lindsey and Zoellick, as government officials, were required to disclose their consulting; none of the other members uttered a peep before the January 2002 New York Times article about the board.

  6. Should I have disclosed the sum of money I received? I have always understood that when writing about someone you disclose the fact of a potential conflict of interest, not the financial details. If I had disclosed the sum back in January 2001, when I first wrote about Enron for the New York Times, it would have sounded strange - I'm sure people would have accused me of bragging.

  7. Did the payment from Enron cause me to write anything I would not have written otherwise? No. Some people seem to think that because I had nice things to say about Enron's energy trading in a Fortune article - in which I disclosed my connection - I was being out of character. But I have always been a free-market Keynesian: I like free markets, but I want some government supervision to correct market failures and ensure stability. Some of my pro-market Slate pieces enraged people on the left - check out The accidental theorist , or In praise of cheap labor . My Fortune piece about the rise of markets, illustrated by Enron's energy trading, was an attempt to take a sunshine break from the dark pieces I had been writing about the Asian crisis; it was also a favor to my editors, who devoted that issue to e-business. It wasn't at all out of character. In fact, the next column I wrote for Fortune was also a pro-market piece, with kind words for Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher.

  8. Was Enron trying to buy my soul? That's for them to answer. But I wasn't selling.

  Additional resources are...

  Slate: http://www.slate.com/id/2061092/

  SadlyNo!: http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/5472.html

  Felix Salmon: http://www.felixsalmon.com/000051.html

  ThinkAndAsk: http://www.thinkandask.com/news/paulkrugman.html

  Now that you have actual facts, please do the world a favor and do not promulgate myth as truth.

  —Roman Berry Read Roman Berry's other letters
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