Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 25 2013
Dear Paul:
Back in the late 1980s, you helped shape the concept of an emerging market debt overhang. The financial crisis has laid bare the fact that the dividing line between emerging markets and advanced countries is not as crisp as once thought. Indeed, this is a recurring theme of our 2009 book, This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. Today, the growth bind of advanced countries in the periphery of the eurozone has a great deal in common with that of emerging market economies of the 1980s... (carta aberta de Carmen Reinard & Rogoff)
....Your desire to blame our later 2010 paper for the stances of some politicians fails to recognize a basic reality: We were out there endorsing very different policies. Anyone with experience in these matters knows that politicians may float a citation to an academic paper if it suits their purposes. But there are limits to how much policy traction they can get with this device when the paper's authors are out offering very different policy conclusions. You can refer to the appendix to this letter for our views on policy through the financial crisis as they were stated publicly in real time. We were not silent...
...It is worth noting that in the past, polemicists have often pinned the austerity charge on the International Monetary Fund for its work with countries having temporary or permanent debt sustainability issues. Since its origins after World War II, IMF programs have almost always involved some combination of austerity, debt restructurings, and structural reform. When a country that has been running large deficits is suddenly no longer able to borrow new funds, some measure of adjustment is invariably required, and one of the IMF's usual roles has been to serve as a lightning rod. Even before the IMF existed, long periods of autarky and hardship accompanied debt crise...
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