Anatole Kaletsky

The Age of Austerity is over. This is not a prediction, but a simple statement of fact. No serious policymaker anywhere in the world is trying to reduce deficits or debt any longer, and all major central banks are happy to finance more government borrowing with printed money. After Japan’s election of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the undeclared budgetary ceasefire in Washington that followed President Obama’s victory last year, there were just two significant hold-outs against this trend: Britain and the euro-zone. Now, the fiscal “Austerians” and “sado-monetarists” in both these economies have surrendered, albeit for very different reasons.

Much attention has been focused this week on the chaos in Cyprus. Coming after the Italian election and subsequent easing of Italy’s fiscal conditions, the overriding necessity to keep Cyprus within the euro — and its military bases and gas supplies outside Russian control — will almost surely mean another retreat by Germany and the European Central Bank from their excessive austerity demands. But an even more remarkable shift has occurred in Britain. The Cameron government, which embraced fiscal austerity as its main raison d’etre, was suddenly converted to the joys of debt and borrowing in this week’s budget.

Of course, the rhetoric of British Chancellor George Osborne’s budget speech gave no hint of his Damascene conversion. On the contrary, it ridiculed “people who seem to think that the way to borrow less is to borrow more.” But Osborne’s trademark sneers could not disguise the meaning of the policies and numbers he presented.

Long after the U.S., Japanese, Chinese, Canadian, Australian and most European governments, Britain has finally been forced to accept Keynes’s “paradox of thrift”:  A government that tries to reduce its borrowing during a recession generally weakens the economy so much that it ends up increasing its total debt. Conversely, a government that expands deficits during periods of weak economic activity, or finds ways to encourage private borrowing and discourage private saving, usually ends up lightening the national debt burden.

Osborne’s budget numbers presented a textbook example of Keynes’s paradox. In last year’s budget, Osborne predicted that government debt would peak at 76% of GDP in fiscal year 2014/15; but this week, despite (or because of) another year of Draconian tax increases and spending cuts, he has projected the government’s debt burden to keep rising for a further two years, to 86% in 2016/17. Contrast this with the U.S. budgetary experience, where the debt ratio has already stabilized near Osborne’s original 76% target, despite (or because of)  the Republicans’ refusal to raise taxes and the Democrats’ refusal to cut spending on anything like the British scale.

John Maynard Keynes said back in 1936 that “practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” Keynes himself is now a seemingly defunct economist, but his influence connects the two most important events of the week and perhaps of the year: the sudden reversal of fortunes in the U.S. election and the powerful critique of overzealous fiscal austerity produced by the International Monetary Fund.

What connects these two events is an economic question that almost nobody dares to raise publicly, but that now seems destined to dominate the U.S. election and that hung over the IMF annual meeting in Tokyo this week: Do deficits really matter? Or, to restate the issue more precisely: Are government efforts to cut budget deficits counterproductive in conditions of zero interest rates when fiscal austerity suppresses economic growth?

This conclusion is strongly suggested by the IMF’s “World Economic Outlook” produced for the annual meeting. The WEO presented six detailed case studies, starting with Britain from 1918 to 1939, of economies that tried to reduce large public debt burdens with various policy mixes in the past 80 years. It concluded that two conditions were essential for success: very low interest rates and adequate rates of economic growth. If fiscal austerity produces high unemployment and economic stagnation, it is doomed to failure, causing the government’s debt burden to go up instead of down. After examining this historical evidence, the IMF report hinted strongly that at least two major economies were now caught in self-defeating debt spirals: Spain, where the debt trap is created by political pressures from the euro zone, and Britain, where the futile austerity is entirely self-imposed.