Niall Ferguson: ALP's Knight is a Thief in Rusty Armour
[Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. His new book, High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg, has just been published by Penguin.]
To a visitor's ears, there's something very Australian about using the acronym "GFC" to refer to the biggest global financial crisis since the Depression.
In the US GFC brings to mind the recipe for deep-fried chicken devised by Colonel Sanders. KFC stands for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Here, GFC should stand for Gillard's Fraudulent Claim.
The claim in question is that it was the fiscal stimulus injected by the Labor government that saved Australia from much more serious recession. According to one recent election ad, "Labor did what it had to do to avoid recession and protect jobs." The ABC's Kerry O'Brien unthinkingly recycles this line when asking Tony Abbott how he would have saved the 200,000 jobs Labor "created". It must have been music to Julia Gillard's ears when Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz gave her his seal of approval recently. He praised the government's debt splurge as "one of the best-designed Keynesian stimulus packages of any country".
Now, I like Stiglitz. Unlike some Nobel prize winners, he hasn't allowed the Swedish central bank's gong to super-size his self-esteem. But this is not the best argument I have heard him make, for three reasons....
Read entire article at The Australian
To a visitor's ears, there's something very Australian about using the acronym "GFC" to refer to the biggest global financial crisis since the Depression.
In the US GFC brings to mind the recipe for deep-fried chicken devised by Colonel Sanders. KFC stands for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Here, GFC should stand for Gillard's Fraudulent Claim.
The claim in question is that it was the fiscal stimulus injected by the Labor government that saved Australia from much more serious recession. According to one recent election ad, "Labor did what it had to do to avoid recession and protect jobs." The ABC's Kerry O'Brien unthinkingly recycles this line when asking Tony Abbott how he would have saved the 200,000 jobs Labor "created". It must have been music to Julia Gillard's ears when Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz gave her his seal of approval recently. He praised the government's debt splurge as "one of the best-designed Keynesian stimulus packages of any country".
Now, I like Stiglitz. Unlike some Nobel prize winners, he hasn't allowed the Swedish central bank's gong to super-size his self-esteem. But this is not the best argument I have heard him make, for three reasons....