In which Krugman borrows Martin Wolf's scalpel, possibly via Geithner

[n.b. see update in mid-post. I seem to have misread...]

In October 2010, Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf led off a column with a heroic simile to describe Obama's economic performance:

An ambulance stops by the roadside to help a man suffering from a heart attack. After desperate measures, the patient survives. Brought into hospital, he then makes a protracted and partial recovery. Then, two years later, far from feeling grateful, he sues the paramedics and doctors. If it were not for their interference, he insists, he would be as good as new. As for the heart attack, it was a minor event. He would have been far better off if he had been left alone.

That is the situation in which Dr Barack Obama finds himself...more stimulus was needed. After all, it was quite modest: fiscal stimulus was less than 6 per cent of GDP and so accounts for less than a fifth of the cumulative deficits of 2009, 2010 and 2011, while monetary policy is caught in a liquidity trap.

The truth is not that policy was foolhardy and failed, but that it was too timid and so could not succeed.

Lo, now cometh Paul Krugman to review Tim Geithner's memoir: