I THINK the crisis has changed relative standings. Clearly, economists who were sitting on the boards of major financial companies that got into trouble have lost stature. Economists, like Ben Bernanke and Mervyn King, who govern central banks and have made wise and bold policy moves have helped redeem the profession. Economists like Ragu Rajan who saw the financial problems coming and spoke up have gained standing. Economists like Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers who ignored and fostered the problems have lost standing.

The crisis is, I hope, shifting academic focus away from traditional Keynesian macroeconomics and real business cycle models to macro models of multiple equilibria, coordination failure, and financial fraud nurtured by proprietary information. I think this is raising the relative standing of those academic economists, like my colleague Christophe Chamley, who are doing deep and important work on these issues.

Which economists have the most important ideas about the postwar crisis? Well those of us who make policy proposals naturally like our own ideas, but I think there is a growing consensus among economists that countries can't spend their way to recovery, that they need, immediately, to get their long-term fiscal houses in order, and that the developed world's financial system is unsafe at any speed and must be changed from the ground up.