Like We Said
Everyone who thought this through knew this would happen, but the VSPs ignore people who agree with Keynes: the Guardian reports that Ireland is back in recession as global slowdown hits exports:
Ireland ended last year in recession, according to figures released on Thursday, dealing a blow to the policy of economic austerity being forced on struggling eurozone countries by the European commission and the IMF.
A dip of 0.2% in GDP in the last quarter of 2011 followed a steep fall in the third quarter, after an export drive was undermined by the slowdown in global demand. A recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of economic contraction.
Ireland, which had become a poster child for austerity when its economy pulled out of its nosedive earlier last year, joins fellow eurozone countries Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal and Greece in recession.
Austerity doesn’t work, has never worked, and logically can’t work in bad economic conditions, but facts aren’t allowed to intrude on beliefs, and the people needed to be punished, even if they had nothing to do with the problem.
This is what is going to happen in the US if the mental midgets in Washington continue to emphasize the ‘deficit’. The economy will go into a deeper recession, the deficit will get worse, and any recovery will take years longer to achieve. Reality doesn’t matter to the Austerians.
5 comments
“two consecutive quarters of economic contraction.”
I don’t know what the international economic community is birthing, but I can see that the contractions are coming more frequently with time…
In “social studies” in high school, in the section on economics, I was reassured to be taught that we learned some things from the Great Depression that meant we would never have to go through one of those again.
In college, in literally Econ 101, I learned some of the particulars of the approach that would guarantee we wouldn’t have another Great Depression.
In old age, I am learning that a lot of allegedly bright people seem to have forgotten what they presumably learned in high school and college about preventing depressions. Or maybe they remember just fine, but they’ve got theirs, and to hell with the rest of us…
Too many ‘professionals’ have signed on with the ‘new paradigm in economics’ which is going to explain everything, and relegated all of the hard-won knowledge of the Depression to ‘history’. The concept is that business has changed, so none of that ‘ancient wisdom’ is valid in the ‘new economy’.
Of course, no one bothered to tell the economy that it was working in an entirely different way, so it continues to do exactly what it did before.
It is something like Suvorov’s view of elaborate plans for battles – plans only really work if both sides know what the plan is, and they agree to follow it.
I think some of the saddest headlines I have read in the past year are about the horses in Ireland being let loose to fend for themselves due to their owners financial dire straights. Ireland has more horses per capita than almost all other countries and these horses end up starving or freezing to death alongside the roads.
Goldman Sachs and their “austerity pimping” ilk are truly evil.
Now now, people. The economic plans of the Austerians work exactly the way they’re designed to work — they result in the looting of the wealth of nations for the benefit of a crony elite. What, you thought the stated goals of the Austerians were the true goals of the Austerians? Bwahaha!
Iceland is the only example of a nation’s government acting in the best interests of their people, Jill. Everyone else is bailing out the professional gamblers in the financial sector.
Ireland’s government had absolutely no need to cover the losses of the private Irish banks. The people who made the money during ‘the good times’ should have sustained the losses when reality asserted itself. Bankruptcy and criminal prosecutions are the best way of dealing with these problems, a way that ensures it will be a long time before they recur.
Yes, Badtux, we both know who benefits from Austerity, and it isn’t people or countries.