Commentaries (some of them cheeky or provocative) on economic topics by Ralph Musgrave. This site is dedicated to Abba Lerner. I disagree with several claims made by Lerner, and made by his intellectual descendants, that is advocates of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). But I regard MMT on balance as being a breath of fresh air for economics.
Saturday, 3 October 2015
Pro austerity pillocks.
It is important to remember that it’s not just the political right which has advocated austerity, i.e. rapid deficit reduction, since the crisis started. First, a large number of so called “professional” economists have advocated austerity. There’s a list of 20 of them here.
Most of the latter 20 subsequently backtracked.
Also the IMF and OECD attributed supreme importance to so called “consolidation”, i.e. cutting debts and deficits, at the height of the crisis.
Bill Mitchell has gone into IMF and OECD incompetence in some detail. Google the name of Bill’s blog “Billyblog” and IMF and OECD for details.
For more on this, see this article by Simon Wren-Lewis from whom I got the above two links.
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