Let's not forget that Krugman was one of the chief advocates of the housing bubble (before it popped) and that his "berating of the raters" should begin with an apology.
http://blog.mises.org/10153/krugman-did-cause-the-housing-bu...
http://blog.mises.org/10153/krugman-did-cause-the-housing-bu...
This 2005 example of libertarian economic thought is particularly ironic, arguing that measures of inflation like CPI give too much weight to housing and car prices while an adjacent advert promotes a book explaining how the crisis was caused by too much easy money: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3752
Other sparkling jewels of economic wisdom include his prediction at the beginning of 2008 that recession was a non-issue, or his comments from earlier in the decade (when the Fed had raised rates a bit) that the nation would achieve substantial long term benefits from the 'glorious housing boom' created by previously low rates, which had allowed many refinancers to invest and consume more.
Physician, heal thyself.
Please don't take the link as a blanket endorsement of libertarianism; it was just the first link that came up as a result of my google search. I remembered reading up on Krugman's predictive failures many months ago ...
Krugman stopped being an economist a long time ago and is now a political hack - regardless of whether or not he has a point in this particular instance. I imagine that you didn't need Krugman to tell you that the raters were issuing ridiculous ratings ...
no disagreement there. It's just I think the same is true of some of his loudest critics :)
If you find some quotes from 2004 or beyond where Krugman actually advocates policies that would encourage a housing bubble, then you may have a case.
The burden is, in fact, on you to find a link from circa 2004-6 by Krugman calling for restraint of the bubble whose inflation he advocated so fiercely. See above for a more detailed exposition of this point.
Anyways, here is another article from 2002. I don't know how you can get any more incriminating:
Quoting Krugman: To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/02/opinion/dubya-s-double-dip...
BTW, asking for a quote from 2004 calling for the creation of a housing bubble is a bit ridiculous: by then the housing bubble was in full bloom.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c1/Median_and_Ave...
As you can see, late 2002 (when the above article was written) would have been just at the beginning of the disaster.
(sorry for the delayed reply; at work all day.)
1. Consider: who would actually be so buffoonish as to call for the creation of a financial bubble at the peak moment before said bubble was about to burst - particularly when the bubble had reached an historical scale. Krugman is silly, but not that silly.
2. As it turns out, he was calling for the bubble at that crucial moment in history which we now recognize as the actual creation of the bubble. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c1/Median_and_Ave...
Let me spell it out for you: he got what he asked for, when he asked for it.
3. Given that he called for the creation of a bubble, I am willing to assume that perhaps he didn't mean for it to get so over-inflated. But that puts the burden on you to find an article circa 2004 for him saying: stop, I meant only inflate it a little ...
Of course he did not call for the creation of the bubble just before it popped. In fact, it is much worse: he called for the inflation of the bubble just as it was getting started.
We all know how that ended ...