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THE good news, said Alan Blinder of Princeton University to a crowded hall on the opening day of this year's gathering of the American Economic Association (AEA) in San Francisco, is that the stockmarket rallied yesterday. The bad news, he joked, is that it bounced on hopes that the economy's problems would be solved at the AEA meetings.
No such luck. The prevailing mood at this year's event was one of despair, not hope. The tone of the three-day conference, which ran between January 3rd and 5th, was set on its first morning when Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University outlined the results of new research conducted with Carmen Reinhart of the University of Maryland. The paper, a sequel to work presented at the 2008 conference, looks at the aftermath of past financial meltdowns to gauge just how bad America's recession might be.
