And Paul Krugman comments:
The Halt and the Lame: Ryan Avent reminds us just how poor economic performance has been since the crisis…. As John Quiggin has been emphasizing, this across-the-board poor performance puts the lie to claims that it’s all because of that scary Obama person; in fact, the US has done better than the rest, although still quite badly — this is indeed a race between the halt and the lame…. What accounts for the differences? The most obvious culprit is austerity…. Europe and the UK have fully reversed any stimulus introduced during the crisis…. You can always try to argue that this has nothing to do with the results we see. But since textbook macroeconomics says that contractionary fiscal policy is contractionary; since those of us who went with the theory rather than the confidence fairy said it would be contractionary; and sure enough, the areas pursuing austerity have done badly; the case for a connection is pretty strong.
And this means that much of the advanced world blithely repeated the mistakes of the 1930s.
Remind me, again, why Ed DeMarco still heads FHFA?
