Well…I have had a few posts here that dealt with the severe austerity that has been imposed by the IMF on Europe (not the personal austerity that prompted me to try to use coffee grounds twice with no success), and have been adamant that trying to grow any economy with austerity just doesn’t work. I have even been supported by a Nobel prize winner, Paul Krugman, but anyone that has had Econ 101 would recognize that going against Keynes is a bad bet. Now, the IMF has come up with a report on the imposed austerity that has sent Europe back into recession saying that the negative multiplier effect (yeah, I know kind of an arcane term) is much larger for budget cuts than they thought it was. What this report said was that the estimate of .6 Euro in lower growth was wildly wrong when the data was in….the negative multiplier actually was closer to 1.5 Euros per dollar of cuts….which means that the planners in Greece, Spain, and Portugal were misled by the IMF and the austerity hawks into tanking their economies just to protect the banks and the rich…how many more times are we going to allow the rich to rig the game and steal more and more from the middle class across the world? The real problem here is that the IMF is not even reading their own reports since they are still pushing the austerity nonsense here in the US when they know that it will result in making the economy worse…right now, with the pushback on austerity by the dems, our economy is still growing which should be the model across the world instead of the crushing of middle classes to keep the banks happy…geez…