Austerity.

Editor,

"Global leaders gathered in Washington on Thursday suggested that all of the efforts to stimulate growth in the European Union and Asia over the last few years have yielded disappointing results."

So austerity has finally been proved to be the counter-productive policy that progressives have been screaming for 5 years is exactly the opposite of what must be done.

Please read your John Maynard Keynes and stop with the spending slashing and deficit paydown nonsense when times are bad. Even Angela Merkel has come to the realization that hiring people to repair roads and bridges puts cash in consumers' pockets and stimulates demand.

All the central bank games the world has been subjected to have done, beyond merely providing the liquidity necessary to pay unemployed people that a sensible fiscal policy would have put to work, is to have artificially inflated stocks and banks' profits at everybody else's expense.

Some very rigid, highly out-of-touch with reality policy-makers have been shoving austerity down the world's throat for far too long. That entire cabal needs to be fired -- it would do them good to acquire firsthand knowledge of what it feels like to be unemployed -- and people who understand how a modern economy works should be hired in their stead.

When interest rates are near zero, you borrow. That is what the austerians have been telling the corporations. But corporations need demand to invest and hire.

Governments should have been borrowing at near-zero rates. And putting people to work.

Re: "Sluggish Global Outlook Ripples in Markets" (10/9/2014)