But I would argue, as Keynes did, that the boom, not the slump, is the time for austerity at the Treasury. To try to cut spending in a slump, as Osborne is doing, is to prolong the slump.

The Taiwanese dollar appreciated, causing Taiwanese exports to slump.

The Taiwanese dollar appreciated, causing Taiwanese exports to slump.

A freshly waxed car, the water molecules slump to about 90 degrees.

Today s particular economic circumstances provide a second reason for establishing a National Investment Bank. In slump or even semi slump conditions, a higher than normal proportion of private savings are held in cash or its nearest equivalent (short term treasury bills).

In order to become cheaper, a country s inflation rate must stay below that of its competitors, but that can be accomplished only through an economic slump. The more trade unions defend existing wage structures, and the lower productivity growth is, the longer the slump will be.

So, naturally, the only way out of the slump that I could think of was, I decided to call Oprah.

Yes, today the European economy is not doing badly. But how long is this likely to last with the US falling into a deep slump?

With everyone busy deleveraging, economies failed to recover. Much of the world, especially Europe, but also the slightly less sickly US, remains stuck in a semi slump.

Greece is in its fifth year of a slump. And eurozone unemployment is at record highs, with nearly one in two young people jobless in Spain and Greece.

A slump, after all, is defined by a deficiency in total spending. To try to cure it by spending less is like trying to cure a sick person by bleeding.

Meanwhile, established modes of production were disrupted, in twenty first century business school parlance, causing productivity to fall. But this slump in productivity was actually a harbinger of better times.

The fact that we were able practically to avert an economic slump during the collapse of the internal economic links of the former Soviet State also played an important role.

LONDON A specter is haunting the treasuries and central banks of the West the specter of secular stagnation. What if there is no sustainable recovery from the economic slump of 2008 2013?

The slump in construction activity in East Asia, together with the large currency depreciations of the major producers in the region, can be expected to increase timber supply for the export markets.

This slump may be inevitable, but it can be mitigated. Implementing policies to facilitate and reward long term investments will be key to exiting the current crisis and boosting the world s growth potential.

Globally, incomes grew briskly inflation abated and stock markets boomed. Moreover, the recovery from the last major slump, in the early 1980s, brought about a quarter century of unprecedentedly strong and stable macroeconomic performance.

But the ECB, whose only mandate is to maintain price stability, cannot pursue this policy without fundamental changes in legislation. Moreover, this scenario cannot take place before the slump has turned into a boom.

But every downturn comes to an end. Success should not be measured by the fact that recovery eventually occurs, but by how quickly it takes hold and how extensive the damage caused by the slump.

About 10 million mortgages are estimated to be underwater (the house is worth less than the loan). And, in key markets around the US, four years into the housing slump, home prices continue to fall.

This whole tangle of debts was finally de facto written off in 1932 in the middle of the global slump. But, until 1980, Germany continued repaying the loans that it had incurred to pay the reparations.

DAKAR The slump in prices for Africa s natural resources, which led to chronic deficits in the past, has been reversed. Consumption, fueled by huge Asian demand for African commodities, is on the rise across the continent.

The level of interest in the Summit, along with other indicators, suggested that public support for the United Nations was slowly improving from the slump that had followed the disagreement in the Security Council over Iraq.

It can choose to lead the Middle East into vibrant multi sectarian democracy or slump back into corrupt local politics under foreign tutelage. The latter path could easily lead to civil strife and, perhaps, another civil war.

In particular, copper production capacity in the major producing countries has been expanded significantly in recent years, and the reduced demand from the East Asian countries has been an additional adverse factor behind the recent price slump.

NEW HAVEN Recent indications of a weakening global economy have led many people to wonder how pervasive poor economic performance will be in the coming years. Are we facing a long global slump, or possibly even a depression?

NEW YORK As the economic slump that began in 2007 persists, the question on everyone s minds is obvious Why? Unless we have a better understanding of the causes of the crisis, we can t implement an effective recovery strategy.

In the eurozone, Ireland, Greece, Portugal, and Cyprus all had to restructure their sovereign debt to avoid outright default. Rising debt GDP ratios cast a pall over fiscal policy, and became the main justification for austerity policies that prolonged the slump.

BERKELEY The United States continues to recover from its deepest economic slump since the Great Depression, but the pace of recovery remains frustratingly slow. There are several reasons to anticipate modest improvement in 2013, although, as usual, there are downside risks.

At the same time, we are now suffering severe consequences from the economic slump in the world, which has been intensified by the fall in world prices for our export products and by serious arrears in the payment of wages.

Economists such as Robert Gordon of Northwestern University argue that this slump in productivity growth reflects the stagnation of technology. Gordon argues that all of the epochal advances, from running water and electricity to the internal combustion and jet engines, have been made.

Krugman thought the bond vigilante claim might be valid for a few countries, such as Greece, but argued that the confidence fairy was no less imaginary than the one that collects children s teeth. Cutting a deficit in a slump could never cause a recovery.

Germany s relative economic and political stability, far from enabling it to disengage from such efforts, makes it among the most important protagonists in their development and implementation. The question is whether Germany s leaders will recognize this before Europe s economy falls into an even deeper slump.

In particular, China s two systems in one country enabled exports to bonded warehouses in Hong Kong to be used to pad trade statistics. Moreover, Chinese exports sometimes would increase in the face of a slump in the volume of cargo being shipped from ports.

While some observers still fret about inflation risk, others are concerned that the usual monetary transmission mechanism is not working, and that the US could face a Japanese style lost decade, while others worry about a 1930 s style slump in the industrial countries.

Work sharing might keep more people marginally attached to their jobs in an economic slump, thereby preserving their self esteem. Instead of laying off 25 of its workforce in a recession, a company could temporarily reduce workers hours from, say, eight per day to six.

Perhaps the dividing line should be drawn between propositions that hold only if people expect them to be true and those that are true irrespective of beliefs. The statement, If we all saved more in a slump, we would all be better off, is absolutely false.

The slump had been created by fiscal extravagance, they insisted, and therefore could be cured only by fiscal austerity. And not any old austerity it was spending on the poor, not the rich, that had to be cut, because such spending was the real cause of the trouble.

Once the link between reform and growth is broken as it has been in Greece his argument collapses. With no path to growth, the creditors demand for an eventual 3.5 of GDP primary surplus is actually a call for more contraction, beginning with another deep slump this year.

To be clear, this is not an argument for Germany s dreaded transfer union ongoing transfers to countries like Greece. It is an argument for temporary transfers to countries like Spain, which balanced its budgets prior to the crisis but then was hit by the housing slump and recession.

Following the dot com collapse of the early 2000 s, speculation in real estate and financial assets enabled by cheap money kept Western economies going. The post 2008 slump merely exposed the unsoundness of the preceding boom the mediocrity of the recovery reflects the mediocrity of previous prospects, coolly considered.

Queen Elizabeth II asked economists during a visit to the London School of Economics at the end of 2008. Four years later, the repeated failure of economic forecasters to predict the depth and duration of the slump would have elicited a similar question from the queen Why the overestimate of recovery?

The electorate is experiencing the greatest slump since 1929 like a bad dream that is half over and politicians don t want to wake them up. The so called autonomous violent left wing radicals in Berlin Kreuzberg enjoy themselves by torching luxury cars, but not a single bank window has been smashed in Germany.

The agreement continues to require primary budget surpluses (net of interest payments), rising to 3.5 of GDP by 2018, which will worsen Greece s slump. Re profiling the country s debt, which is implicitly part of the agreement, will do nothing to ameliorate this, given that interest payments already are minimal through the end of the decade.

True, the slump is partly an illusion the earlier boom was fueled by Japanese households effort to beat the tax by front loading purchases of consumer durables a nuance that seems to have been lost in the public debate. But the big picture remains Abenomics so far has failed to turn around a deflationary mindset.