{"id":23771,"date":"2017-04-25T18:58:54","date_gmt":"2017-04-25T23:58:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=23771"},"modified":"2017-04-25T19:04:39","modified_gmt":"2017-04-26T00:04:39","slug":"surplus-or-stimulus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=23771","title":{"rendered":"Surplus or Stimulus"},"content":{"rendered":"

Surplus or Stimulus<\/a><\/a><\/h3>\n
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Ren\u00e9 Magritte Le Cri du Coeur <\/b>1960<\/h3>\n

Austerity is over, proclaimed the IMF this week. And no doubt attributed that to the \u2018successful\u2019 period of \u2018five years of belt tightening\u2019 a.k.a. \u2018gradual fiscal consolidation\u2019 it has, along with its econo-religious ilk, imposed on many of the world\u2019s people. Only, it\u2019s not true of course. Austerity is not over. You can ask many of those same people about that. It\u2019s certainly not true in Greece.<\/p>\n

IMF Says Austerity Is Over <\/a><\/p>\n

Austerity is over as governments across the rich world increased spending last year<\/b> and plan to keep their wallets open for the foreseeable future. After five years of belt tightening, the IMF says the era of spending cuts that followed the financial crisis is now at an end. \u201cAdvanced economies eased their fiscal stance by one-fifth of 1pc of GDP in 2016, breaking a five-year trend of gradual fiscal consolidation,\u201d said the IMF in its fiscal monitor. <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In Greece, the government did not increase spending in 2016. Nor is the country\u2019s era of spending cuts at an end. So did the IMF \u2018forget\u2019 about Greece? Or does it not count it as part of the rich world? Greece is a member of the EU, and the EU is absolutely part of the rich world, so that can\u2019t be it. Something Freudian, wishful thinking perhaps?<\/p>\n

However this may be, it\u2019s obvious the IMF are not done with Greece yet. And neither are the rest of the Troika. They are still demanding measures that are dead certain to plunge the Greeks much further into their abyss in the future. As my friend Steve Keen put it to me recently: \u201cDreadful. It will become Europe\u2019s Somalia.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Surplus or Stimulus Ren\u00e9 Magritte Le Cri du Coeur 1960 Austerity is over, proclaimed the IMF this week. And no doubt attributed that to the \u2018successful\u2019 period of \u2018five years of belt tightening\u2019 a.k.a. \u2018gradual fiscal consolidation\u2019 it has, along with its econo-religious ilk, imposed on many of the world\u2019s people. Only, it\u2019s not true […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[201,202,1712,246,279,1167,418,1816,13924,1234,2247,5177,2868],"class_list":["post-23771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-deficit","tag-deflation","tag-destruction","tag-economy","tag-eu","tag-greece","tag-imf","tag-pensions","tag-raul-ilargi-meijer","tag-stimulus","tag-surplus","tag-the-automatic-earth","tag-troika"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23771"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23771\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23773,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23771\/revisions\/23773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}