Famous according to who? I would judge his record as probably mixed, like most predictions ("predictions are hard, especially about the future."*) Otherwise picking stocks would do better than random chance.

One could be wrong despite the right reasoning or right for the wrong reasons.

And yet, at some level, I agree with you. It's natural to weight what other people say by perception of their prior predictions. I have a similar reaction to Larry Kudlow or Jim Cramer: if one of them told me the sky was blue, I would have to go outside and double check.

Thinking about it some more, I think I can reconcile the difference by looking at the reasoning versus looking at the result. Like poker: you can make the right move and still lose, or make the wrong move and still win.

To bring that back to the current topic: Trump may yet escape causing a recession, but the reasoning for "this tariff war is a terrible idea" has thus far struck me as a lot more coherent than the reasoning for "this tariff war will lead to prosperity"

* funny enough, after writing this whole spiel, I looked it up to see if I got the Yogi Berra quote right (I didn't), but what did I find? An article about this exact topic (Krugman's predictions): https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/12/predict...