How to Do More
How to do more Speech given by Adam Posen, External Member of the Monetary Policy Committee, Bank of England At Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire 13 September 2011 I have benefitted from discussions of these issues with all of my colleagues on the MPC, as well as with Brad Delong, Joe Gagnon, Ken Kuttner, Kiyohiko Nishimura, and Angel Ubide. Tomas Hellebrandt and Marilyne Tolle provided helpful advice and research assistance. I am grateful to the Ford Foundation and to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for their support of the streams of research work underlying this argument. The views expressed herein, and any errors of fact or of interpretation, however, remain mine alone, and are not those of the MPC, the Bank, Ford, Sloan, or PIIE. All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/speeches We do want more, and when it becomes more, we shall still want more. And we shall never cease to demand more until we have received the results of our labor. - Samuel Gompers, May 2, 1890 Something's better than nothing, yes! But nothing's better than more. - Stephen Sondheim, Sung by Madonna in the movie, Dick Tracy, 1990 Both the UK and the global economy are facing a familiar foe at present: policy defeatism. Throughout modern economic history, whether in Western Europe in the 1920s, in the US and elsewhere in the 1930s, or in Japan in the 1990s, every major financial crisis-driven downturn has been followed by premature abandonment—if not reversal—of the macroeconomic stimulus policies that are necessary to sustained recovery.
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