- From Estonia with Love...

I don't like smug people. I espescially don't like smug people that offer an opinion when they have no skin in the game, regardless of what kind of hardware sits on their mantle. If they would admit they were wrong once in a while, maybe I'd give them a pass...
Paul Krugman is not an economist. Oh, many years ago, he was an econnomist, and pretty good at it too. But these days, he's just one of several political commentators that refuses to admit when he was  wrong, or anything emerging from the political right could possibly work.
One morning Krugman woke-up and said: "I'm going to take a hard-line, take-no-prisoners stance on economic theory and I'm gonna apply it to the affirmation of my favorite political beliefs."
But that wasn't enough.
Below: someone with "skin-in-the-game" hands Mr Smug a long overdue beatdown.
You won't read about it in the press, but I bet you a shiny penny Mr. Smug will use his almighty NY Times blog to tell the world that he knows more about Estonia than the President of Estonia.
However - maybe the President of Estonia knows a bit more about the reality of a geo-political-economic crisis than Krugman ever will... unless of course, the DNC installs him as a the leader of some puppet-regime in a banana republic.
Take your medicine like a good boy, Paul.

 Krugman Anti-Austerity Jab Irks Budget Champ Estonia’s President

June 7 (Bloomberg) -- Estonian President Toomas Ilves lashed out at Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman for questioning the Baltic nation’s economic recovery as an austerity success story.
Estonia’s recovery from a “depression-level” economic slump in 2008-2009 has been a “significant but still incomplete recovery,” Krugman wrote in his New Your Times blog yesterday. “Better than no recovery at all, obviously -- but this is what passes for economic triumph?”The Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, suffered the world’s biggest recessions after the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in 2008 burst a debt-fueled property bubble, shut off credit flows and curbed export demand. The three countries reduced spending and raised taxes by as much as 15 percent in 2009-2010. Estonia was the only country in the euro area to report budget surpluses for the last two years.
“Let’s write about something we know nothing about and be smug, overbearing and patronizing,” Ilves, a graduate of Columbia University, wrote late yesterday on his Twitter Inc. account. “But yes, what do we know? We’re just dumb and silly East Europeans. Unenlightened. Someday we too will understand. Nostra culpa.”He confirmed his comments in an e-mail, adding “it was a sincere and immediate defense of the major and often difficult efforts of Estonia to deal with the economic crisis and to stick to the rules adopted in the European Union.”
Austerity Needed
Austerity is necessary to produce growth, Ilves said last month in an interview, adding that growth as a policy “doesn’t make sense.” He failed to predict his country’s recession at the end of 2007, calling forecasts of an economic crisis “fear mongering” in a New Year’s Eve speech.
European Central Bank Executive Board member Joerg Asmussen this month cited the Baltic countries as an example of the benefits of fiscal overhaul. Krugman, along with economists including New York University’s Nouriel Roubini, in 2008 and 2009 forecast the Baltic countries would have to abandon their currency pegs to the euro as the costs of austerity would become too high for their populations.
The austerity measures helped Estonia improve its budget balance by more than 10 percent of gross domestic product, adopt the euro last January and cut government debt to 6 percent of gross domestic product, the lowest among the 17 countries that use the currency.
The $19 billion economy grew 7.6 percent last year, the fastest pace in the European Union. Economic output may return to pre-crisis levels, adjusted for inflation, in 2014, the central bank said in December.