Tag Archives: expansionary fiscal austerity

In my new INET working paper, I revisit their method and identify a fatal fallacy of the case for expansionary austerity that by itself overturns the claims made for the view.Statisticians call the mistake “reverse causality.” What it means, in this case, is that the statistical techniques adopted to test models of expansionary austerity fail to properly account for cyclical movements in the expenditure-GDP ratio. It follows that decreasing expenditure-GDP-ratios appear to cause an increase...

A bit of ideological bias at work influencing view of causality, namely, that austerity is expansionary because saving funds investment? I suppose that if Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) were implemented, foreign exchange markets would have their say about it (provided we still had floating exchange rates). Do you think it is a coincidence that the two biggest bull markets correspond with government austerity? I do not. And tell us what happened after the two biggest bull markets? MMT...

The IMF hitman in Europe, one Poul Thomsem recently published a European Money and Finance Forum (SUERF) Policy Note (October 2018) – A Financial Union for the Euro Area – where he basically told us that any changes that the IMF will allow to occur in the Eurozone architecture will be minimal and will not stop Member States “from being forced to undertake large pro-cyclical fiscal adjustments when the next shock or major downturn hits”. The term “large pro-cyclical fiscal adjustments” means...

This is the second and final part in my discussion about the latest attempts by the IMF and notable New Keynesian macroeconomists to keep the ‘fiscal contraction expansion’ lie alive. The crisis in Italy is once again giving these characters a ‘playing field’ to rehearse their destructive ideas that rose to prominence during the worst days of the GFC, when the European Commission and the IMF (along with the OECD and other groups) touted the idea of ‘growth friendly’ austerity. Nations were...