thetorwhington post August 16, 2012 Rewriting economic history against Obama By Robert Shapiro Two respected economic advisers to the Romney campaign launched a new line of criticism of President Obama's economic stewardship on this page this week ["Obama's faulty math; his economic arguments contradict themselves," op-ed, Aug. 16]. The case offered by Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute and Glenn Hubbard of Columbia Business School contained three bold claims. Two of the three are demonstrably wrong as matters of economics, and the other is off-point. First, Hassett and Hubbard say that the president has misled the country in claiming that economies that suffer financial crises typically recover only very slowly. Second, they insist that Obama himself didn't expect a slow recovery, judging by his administration's initial forecast. And they say that if Obama did expect a slow recovery, he should have known that Keynesian stimulus wouldn't work under that circumstance. If this brief were true, it could suggest that the president was befuddled in his early months in office, then lied to promote his stimulus package and now is lying again. But this brief is simply wrong, and as good economists, they should know it. To refute Obama's claim about the slow recovery — as well as a recent, landmark study documenting hundreds of disappointing recoveries following financial crises around the world — Hassett and Hubbard cite a less well-known study from the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank. That study, by Michael Bordo and Joseph Haubrich, found that financial crises in the United States often have been followed by strong recoveries. But the main evidence comes from the long series of financial busts from 1880 to the 1920s. In fact, Bordo and Haubrich note that the three major U.S. financial crises since the 1920s — 1932-33, 1990-91 and 2007-08 — were all followed by notably slow recoveries. Moreover, as Ezra Klein reported in The Post this