kiwiman127
Comfortably Moderate
I saw this very interesting article, I'm not sure it's been posted yet.
Who Is Defending Austerity Now?
Austerians have had their worst week since the last time GDP numbers came out for a country that's tried austerity.
But this time is, well, different. It's not "just" that southern Europe is stuck in a depression and Britain is stuck in a no-growth trap. It's that the very intellectual foundations of austerity are unraveling. In other words, economists are finding out that austerity doesn't work in practice or in theory.
What a difference an Excel coding error makes.
Austerity has been a policy in search of a justification ever since it began in 2010. Back then, policymakers decided it was time for policy to go back to "normal" even though the economy hadn't, because deficits just felt too big. The only thing they needed was a theory telling them why what they were doing made sense. Of course, this wasn't easy when unemployment was still high, and interest rates couldn't go any lower. Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna took the first stab at it, arguing that reducing deficits would increase confidence and growth in the short-run. But this had the defect of being demonstrably untrue (in addition to being based off a naïve reading of the data). Countries that tried to aggressively cut their deficits amidst their slumps didn't recover; they fell into even deeper slumps.
Enter Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff. They gave austerity a new raison d'être by shifting the debate from the short-to-the-long-run. Reinhart and Rogoff acknowledged austerity would hurt today, but said it would help tomorrow -- if it keeps governments from racking up debt of 90 percent of GDP, at which point growth supposedly slows dramatically. Now, this result was never more than just a correlation -- slow growth more likely causes high debt than the reverse -- but that didn't stop policymakers from imputing totemic significance to it. That is, it became a "fact" that everybody who mattered knew was true.
Except it wasn't. Reinhart and Rogoff goofed. They accidentally excluded some data in one case, and used some wrong data in another; the former because of an Excel snafu. If you correct for these very basic errors, their correlation gets even weaker, and the growth tipping point at 90 percent of GDP disappears. In other words, there's no there there anymore.
Austerity is back to being a policy without a justification. Not only that, but, as Paul Krugman points out, Reinhart and Rogoff's spreadsheet misadventure has been a kind of the-austerians-have-no-clothes moment. It's been enough that even some rather unusual suspects have turned against cutting deficits now. For one, Stanford professor John Taylor claims L'affaire Excel is why the G20, the birthplace of the global austerity movement in 2010, was more muted on fiscal targets recently.
The discovery of errors in the Reinhart-Rogoff paper on the growth-debt nexus is already impacting policy. A participant in last Friday's G20 meetings told me that the error was a factor in the decision to omit specific deficit or debt-to-GDP targets in the G20 communique.
For another, Bill Gross, the manager of the world's largest bond fund, and who, as Joseph Cotterill of FT Alphaville points out, used to be quite the fan of British austerity, made a big about-face in an interview with the Financial Times on Monday:
"The UK and almost all of Europe have erred in terms of believing that austerity, fiscal austerity in the short term, is the way to produce real growth. It is not. You've got to spend money. Bond investors want growth much like equity investors, and to the extent that too much austerity leads to recession or stagnation then credit spreads widen out -- even if a country can print its own currency and write its own checks. In the long term it is important to be fiscal and austere. It is important to have a relatively average or low rate of debt to GDP. The question in terms of the long term and the short term is how quickly to do it".
For more go to: Who Is Defending Austerity Now? - Matthew O'Brien - The Atlantic
Austerity is a failed experiment,,not only in theory but also in real life case points. There is no doubt.
Who Is Defending Austerity Now?
Austerians have had their worst week since the last time GDP numbers came out for a country that's tried austerity.
But this time is, well, different. It's not "just" that southern Europe is stuck in a depression and Britain is stuck in a no-growth trap. It's that the very intellectual foundations of austerity are unraveling. In other words, economists are finding out that austerity doesn't work in practice or in theory.
What a difference an Excel coding error makes.
Austerity has been a policy in search of a justification ever since it began in 2010. Back then, policymakers decided it was time for policy to go back to "normal" even though the economy hadn't, because deficits just felt too big. The only thing they needed was a theory telling them why what they were doing made sense. Of course, this wasn't easy when unemployment was still high, and interest rates couldn't go any lower. Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna took the first stab at it, arguing that reducing deficits would increase confidence and growth in the short-run. But this had the defect of being demonstrably untrue (in addition to being based off a naïve reading of the data). Countries that tried to aggressively cut their deficits amidst their slumps didn't recover; they fell into even deeper slumps.
Enter Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff. They gave austerity a new raison d'être by shifting the debate from the short-to-the-long-run. Reinhart and Rogoff acknowledged austerity would hurt today, but said it would help tomorrow -- if it keeps governments from racking up debt of 90 percent of GDP, at which point growth supposedly slows dramatically. Now, this result was never more than just a correlation -- slow growth more likely causes high debt than the reverse -- but that didn't stop policymakers from imputing totemic significance to it. That is, it became a "fact" that everybody who mattered knew was true.
Except it wasn't. Reinhart and Rogoff goofed. They accidentally excluded some data in one case, and used some wrong data in another; the former because of an Excel snafu. If you correct for these very basic errors, their correlation gets even weaker, and the growth tipping point at 90 percent of GDP disappears. In other words, there's no there there anymore.
Austerity is back to being a policy without a justification. Not only that, but, as Paul Krugman points out, Reinhart and Rogoff's spreadsheet misadventure has been a kind of the-austerians-have-no-clothes moment. It's been enough that even some rather unusual suspects have turned against cutting deficits now. For one, Stanford professor John Taylor claims L'affaire Excel is why the G20, the birthplace of the global austerity movement in 2010, was more muted on fiscal targets recently.
The discovery of errors in the Reinhart-Rogoff paper on the growth-debt nexus is already impacting policy. A participant in last Friday's G20 meetings told me that the error was a factor in the decision to omit specific deficit or debt-to-GDP targets in the G20 communique.
For another, Bill Gross, the manager of the world's largest bond fund, and who, as Joseph Cotterill of FT Alphaville points out, used to be quite the fan of British austerity, made a big about-face in an interview with the Financial Times on Monday:
"The UK and almost all of Europe have erred in terms of believing that austerity, fiscal austerity in the short term, is the way to produce real growth. It is not. You've got to spend money. Bond investors want growth much like equity investors, and to the extent that too much austerity leads to recession or stagnation then credit spreads widen out -- even if a country can print its own currency and write its own checks. In the long term it is important to be fiscal and austere. It is important to have a relatively average or low rate of debt to GDP. The question in terms of the long term and the short term is how quickly to do it".
For more go to: Who Is Defending Austerity Now? - Matthew O'Brien - The Atlantic
Austerity is a failed experiment,,not only in theory but also in real life case points. There is no doubt.
