1870 as the Inflection Point: An In-Take from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century
Hoisted/Smackdown: Yes, Noam Chomsky Is a Liar. Why Do You Ask?

Blaming the Pollyannaish fecklessness of the Bank of England on the feckless indolence of Britain's reporters: Simon Wren-Lewis: How UK deficit hysteria began: "Monetary policy ran out of reliable levers to manage the economy. However, journalists wouldn’t know that from the Bank of England, who tended to talk as if Quantitative Easing was a close substitute to interest rates as a monetary policy instrument...

...They would know it from academic macroeconomists, but journalists were generally too busy to make the effort to talk to them. For whatever reason, they did not fully appreciate how much the world had changed as a result of the GFC. So when in the budget of April 2009 the Treasury showed the full extent of the deficits that the recession (and to a smaller extent the government’s stimulus measures) had created, journalists behaved exactly as they would have done before the GFC.... So the coverage was all about higher taxes and lower spending, and whether they would be enough to close the record deficit. At no point in the subsequent discussion does anyone ask whether the current deficits are large enough to create a strong recovery...


#shouldread

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