"I can't help but juxtapose our plight to the tycoons and politicians. They are never satisfied with their enormous wealth, and always want more millions no matter whom it hurts. They STEAL from pension funds, banks, the people and government, and little Wall Street investors. Then rather than face punishment, they become petty kings in this world. They are disloyal to America, unpatriotic, and serve their own foreign UN-American greedy causes and demand more and more and more.

I feel that this is not the nation into which I was born. I was born in America, the land of the free and the home of the brave. America, where people give as much as they receive. America, where all people work for the common good, and try to leave a better and more prosperous nation for the next generation. America, where people help their neighbors and show charity and mercy. This new America is alien to me -- it is an America of greed and corruption and avarice and mean spirited selfishness and hatred of the common good -- it is an America of savage beasts roaring and tearing at the weak, and bullying the humble and peacemakers and poor and those without means to defend themselves. I am not welcome here anymore. I don't belong here anymore. It's as if some evil beast controls government, the economy, and our lives now."

From the column, Krugman asserts that Obama "without saying so" is saying that the  "stimulus failed, and should never be tried again." And Krugman rebuts, the "stimulus can't have failed, because it never happened."

One thing I do on a regular basis is analyze information about market size and activity, and over time, it's taken place in a very wide range of industries (yours truly specializes in oddball deals). Unless you are dealing with markets in which the government demands extensive reporting (like Japan, the data you can get in Japanese is just fantastic) or ones where you have a system of centralized reporting or other tight controls (like pharmaceuticals), it is very difficult even to get decent estimates of market size. So a basic issue is: understand the integrity of data.

Now consider commodities. Inventories can be held LOTS of places: storage facilities by private owners (major refiners such as flour mills), finished product, private speculators (there have been reports for years of base metal stockpiling in China), even the consumer level (during the oil crisis, people kept their auto gas tanks fuller due to the even-odd license plate gas station system). Consider what a monstrous supervisory apparatus around the world would be required to track all or even a substantial portion of where inventories in various commodities could be held.

The logical fallacy for Krugman is the official inventories he is looking at are only a subset of the places where inventory can be accumulated, and in many if not most cases a small enough subset that he cannot reach conclusions of the absence of inventory accumulation. For instance, in our long running discussion about oil prices in 2008, Krugman focused on official inventories. We pointed out that that storage was limited and actually surprisingly impractical. Those figures did not include the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (which was increasing its holdings during the 2008 price rise) nor did it consider that oil can simply be stored in the ground, via reducing well output.