Well, the international lender of last resort SHOULD be a fiscal scold. Nobody wants the IMF to be springing in to action a whole lot. That point of view is just always going to be there in their work. I think they're right in the Fiscal Monitor report to talk the way they do about Sweden's model/actions in response to the crisis. It would be vastly preferable to the W/Obama years taken as a whole, and we had budget surpluses at the same time when Sweden started paying down their debts, but in 2008 and 2012 we don't have the option to go back in time and cancel the Bush tax cuts, Medicare Part D, and/or Iraq War. Current policy makers have to play the hand they're dealt.
The IMF isn't the international lender of last resort, nor should it be. The IMF is under no obligation to extend loans to members that cannot finance their debt. As for the Swedes, I would agree. Reinfeldt received widespread international criticism for being one of the few leaders to refuse to undertake a stimulus program, and yet Sweden came out of the recession better than most countries until the Eurozone crisis hit. The Swedish stimulus you are referring to is only a recent development. In fact, while we are making these comparisons, Sweden reacted pretty much in the opposite manner that the United States did, right up to letting their major auto manufacturer, Saab, fail. There was no Keynesian counterpunch during the recession.
I'll cop to being an unemployment hawk. If somebody wants to discount what I have to say about anything because of that, they're welcome to. I can't stop it. If you want to call JFK a top 15 President and then castigate any source that does the same thing and build yourself your own little e-Mount Olympus where you cast thunderbolts of hackery accusations, I can't stop that, either.
And I recall you giving me a good bit of grief for that little oversight. No need to get butthurt when I call you out for dismissing an entire respected economic research group because you don't like what they say. If you are going to disagree with their conclusions, fine, but throw some weight behind it, don't just chalk it up to "institutional bias". I don't go around dismissing the Fed because they are the Fed, or NBER because they are NBER. These are groups that put tens of thousands of man hours into compiling data and producing well thought out research. I don't accuse them of hackery. The people I do accuse of hackery are those who eschew actual research and write 400 word blog posts featuring cherrypicked data points to please their Upper West Side audience.
The chart is small (and also a cutout of a series of charts), but the vertical axis is the error in the growth forecasts, not a measurement of growth itself. The chart isn't based on the larger multiplier, it's the evidence for it.
My mistake. The font is hard to read. At any rate, that's hardly evidence. Greece is a different animal entirely, credit markets there collapsed well before the fiscal consolidation started. All that graph says (with regard to Greece) is that their forecasts overestimated growth, and that the fiscal consolidation was large. There is no reason to believe that one is the causal factor behind the other. So Greece's fiscal consolidation was large. Greece is also in the midst of a total economic collapse. They didn't really put much effort into mitigating confounding variables. The fact of the matter is that greater fiscal consolidation is occurring in nations that were in a more dire economic situation to begin with. As for the rest of the data points, it looks like they generally hit the mark with their forecasts regardless of the size of the fiscal consolidation. Missing by 1% is not that bad, all things considered. Again, I'd like to see the data series for that graph, so I can take out the obvious outliers and rerun the regression.
The US, as a G20 nation, is included in the IMF study. I think it's relevant. I think Cameron is a good-enough analog for Tea Party Republicanism. I think English institutions are similar enough for comparisons. If you think we can't possibly see any natural experiments, whether they're cross-country or with the Great Depression, I question why you'd even care to rebut anything I write with something other than economic nihilism.
No, they aren't. British institutions operate much differently than American institutions. Yes, I can see natural experiments. But I prefer natural experiments that go beyond simply comparing two growth rates and declaring the case closed. That's just bad science.