The Seattle Economics Council's lunchtime event at Town Hall last Thursday could not have been a more perfect picture of the current state of economics. The speakers were Steve Keen and Gerard Fitzpatrick. Keen is from Australia; Fitzpatrick is from Ireland. Keen is an economics professor who is famous for, one, predicting the crash of 2008, and, two, attacking Paul Krugman's solutions for getting out of the present Great Recession. Fitzpatrick is a bond fund manager for Russell Investments, a $150 billion company that moved to Seattle from Tacoma in 2009 and is currently the most recognizable occupant of the gorgeous splash of glass and steel that Washington Mutual built and owned until it filed for bankruptcy in 2008 and bled thousands of jobs out of our city's financial district (the tower is now called the Chase Center).
