On economic stupidity

BILL Clinton's 1992 campaign famously focused on "the economy, stupid". But macroeconomic policy - what to do about recessions - has been largely absent from this year's election discussion.

Yet economic risks have by no means been banished from the world. And you should be frightened by how little many of the people who would be president have learnt from the past eight years.

If you've been following the financial news, you know that there's a lot of market turmoil out there. It's nothing like 2008, at least so far, but it's worrisome. Once again we have a substantial amount of troubled debt, this time not home mortgages but loans to energy companies, hit hard by plunging oil prices. Meanwhile, formerly trendy emerging economies like Brazil are suddenly doing very badly, and China is stumbling. And while the US economy is doing better than almost anyone else's, we're definitely not immune to contagion.