On Monday, the patron saint of that perspective, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, weighed in on Canada's G20 summit. Mr. Krugman called the results “deeply discouraging,” arguing that an embrace of austerity exacerbated the Great Depression and that current policy makers have likely condemned the world to a similar fate.
“We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression,” Mr. Krugman wrote in his New York Times column. “It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost – to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs – will nonetheless be immense.”
till, Mr. Krugman’s is a hard voice to ignore. All three of those economists said they agreed with the Nobel Prize winner’s larger point: that policy makers represent one of the biggest risks to the recovery.
“This the wrong time to be pulling the plug on fiscal stimulus,” said Carl Weinberg, chief economist with High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, N.Y.