Introduction
In an op-ed column in the influential New York Times on December 21, 2007 Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics, columnist, bestselling author and professor of economics at Princeton University, wrote of the mortgage crisis in the USA that “the explosion of ‘innovative’ home lending that took place in the middle years of this decade was an unmitigated disaster.” He was responding – in his usual confident manner – to a statement from Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke in connection with the then pending mortgage crisis in the USA stating specifically that “Market discipline has in some cases broken down, and the incentives to follow prudent lending procedures have, at times, eroded.”
Do the sentiments in that column have any resonance in Guyana where the term ‘housing bubble’ has appeared twice – albeit by one writer – in the letter columns of this newspaper? When it was first raised President Jagdeo, the