Daily Archives: July 29, 2011

By Pavlina R. Tcherneva

Keynes once said that “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist” (Keynes 1964, 383). Two among those modern economists must surely be Reinhart and Rogoff, as no other book in recent history has contributed so much to the mass phobia and delusion about the debt and the deficit as theirs. This is a book that reinforces some of the worst ideas in the economics profession, a profession that refuses to acknowledge that we are no longer on a gold standard and that a government which has a monopoly over its own currency can both supply it without facing default and regulate its value.

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