She starts leaning back.

You don't need to shrink the disease.

She did accept and then backed away.

And yet notwithstanding, they go out and they meet it.

And when I talk about my ideas, they're like, BBut it's not scalable, you know.

95 percent of the glaciers in the world are retreating or shrinking.

I call on them not to backslide on these honourable commitments.

Brown Glacier, Heard Island, had retreated by 50 metres over three years, with the lower slopes of the glacier having lost as much as 11 metres in thickness, while Collins Glacier, King George Island, retreated by some 200 metres between 1987 and 2005.

So, to understand this and I'm going to stress this it's not about the consumer being in retreat.

But the point is that what happens once you start kind of quietly leaning back?

They're on a journey there's no turning back.

They're both shrinking and retreating and some of them have disappeared altogether.

A tremendous amount of ice has been let out of these valleys as it's retreated and deflated, gone back up valley.

A public debt crisis in Japan (as the combination of recession, deflation, and high deficits drove up the debt GDP ratio).

China has pledged to match the US shot for shot, and the world's second largest economy is unlikely to blink anytime soon.

Pension payments now account for 16 of Greek GDP precisely because Greece s economy is 25 smaller than it was in 2009. Without five years of disastrous austerity, Greek GDP might be 33 higher than it is now, and pensions would be 12 of GDP rather than 16 .

Of course, some retreat may only be data shrink, but the strength of these players may not have been reduced.

First, front loaded fiscal austerity however necessary is accelerating the contraction, as higher taxes and lower government spending and transfer payments reduce disposable income and aggregate demand. Moreover, as the recession deepens, resulting in even wider fiscal deficits, another round of austerity will be needed.

So a lot of economists look at declining population and expect to see stagnation, maybe depression.

95 percent of the glaciers in the world are retreating or shrinking, and that's because the precipitation patterns and the temperature patterns are changing.

The ECB s monetary policy is too tight and Germany is front loading fiscal austerity. Thus, the periphery is destined to a destructive deflationary and recessionary adjustment that will exacerbate the risks of recession, insolvency, eventual defaults and, possibly, exit from the euro.

Nothing could be more harmful to us than to be held back by the obstacles in our path, or to settle for inactivity and withdrawal from action and striving.

And, without that, all it has is a recession strategy that makes austerity and reform self defeating, because, if output continues to contract, deficit and debt ratios will continue to rise to unsustainable levels. Moreover, the social and political backlash eventually will become overwhelming.

The trouble is that the eurozone has an austerity strategy but no growth strategy. And, without that, all it has is a recession strategy that makes austerity and reform self defeating, because, if output continues to contract, deficit and debt ratios will continue to rise to unsustainable levels.

The inability of unconventional monetary policies to prevent outright deflation partly reflects the fact that such policies seek to weaken the currency, thereby improving net exports and increasing inflation. This, however, is a zero sum game that merely exports deflation and recession to other economies.

The Ifo Institute has forecast that GDP will contract by 2.2 in 2009. But the contraction will be primarily because of declining exports, a large portion of which consists of investment goods, as well as the drop in domestic equipment investment.

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.

If we slow the disease, we may have more of a benefit on patient survival, patient outcome, how they feel, than if we shrink the disease.

Governments should therefore restrict spending cuts to those that will not cause the economy to contract. Likewise, they should increase only those taxes that, when raised, do not reduce consumption, investment, or job creation.

Policymakers will have to worry about a strange beast called stag deflation (a combination of economic stagnation recession and deflation) about liquidity traps (when official interest rates become so close to zero that traditional monetary policy loses effectiveness) and about debt deflation (the rise in the real value of nominal debts, increasing the risk of bankruptcy for distressed households, firms, financial institutions, and governments).

But these countries real economies would benefit from a furlough from the eurozone. Depreciation inside the eurozone in the form of deflation, on the other hand, would drive large parts of the real economy into excessive debt, because only the value of assets, not that of bank debts, would decline.

But when we went to speak with her, when we took this photograph, the slaveholders were still menacing us from the sidelines. They hadn't been really pushed back.

TOKYO It has been almost a year since Prime Minister Shinzo Abe launched his plan to lift Japan s economy out of two decades of deflation and recession. How has Abenomics fared so far?

Fable of the Bees developed a wide following, and generated substantial controversy, which continues to this day. The austerity plans being adopted by governments in much of Europe and elsewhere around the world, and the curtailment of consumption expenditure by individuals as well, threaten to produce a global recession.

Nor is it a minor political headache for Merkel to have to face an anti austerity alliance of Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti and the new French president, François Hollande. Spain s capacity to withstand an austerity cure that only sinks it deeper into recession must also have its limits.

You go to the future back, back, back, back, like that.

That also means that Germany and the ECB have less power than they seem to believe. Unless they abandon asymmetric adjustment (recessionary deflation), which concentrates all of the pain in the periphery, in favor of a more symmetrical approach (austerity and structural reforms on the periphery, combined with eurozone wide reflation), the monetary union's slow developing train wreck will accelerate as peripheral countries default and exit.

Moreover, many employers, seeking to share the pain of recession and slow down layoffs, are now asking workers to accept cuts in both hours and hourly wages. British Airways, for example, has asked workers to work for an entire month without pay.

But that is logically flawed even with deflation, real purchasing power would fall, and the real value of debts would rise (debt deflation), as the real depreciation occurs. More importantly, the exit path would restore growth right away, via nominal and real depreciation, avoiding a decade long depression.

But the issue of enrichment has been blown up into such a symbol of national sovereignty in Iran that no government there, not only the current Achmadinejad administration, will climb down. Indeed, when the UN Security Council formally demanded a stop to the enrichment program and imposed mild sanctions last December, Iran s defiant answer was to increase enrichment activity.

The bitter medicine that Germany and the ECB want to impose on the periphery the second option is recessionary deflation fiscal austerity, structural reforms to boost productivity growth and reduce unit labor costs, and real depreciation via price adjustment, as opposed to nominal exchange rate adjustment.

The recession in other advanced economies (the euro zone, United Kingdom, European Union, Canada, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand) started in the second quarter of 2008, before the financial turmoil in September and October further aggravated the global credit crunch. This contraction has become even more severe since then.

The third lesson that the IMF was unable to apply in Greece is that austerity often leads to a vicious cycle, as spending cuts cause the economy to contract far more than it would have otherwise. Because the IMF lends money on a short term basis, there was an incentive to ignore the effects of austerity in order to arrive at growth projections that imply an ability to repay.

But deflation is associated with persistent recession (see Argentina again), and no country s society and political system can accept years of recession and fiscal austerity to achieve real depreciation. Default and an exit from the euro would occur well before that.

Compression