From an EUobserver story that includes this money quote from the economists’ report: “Forecasters significantly underestimated the increase in unemployment and the decline in domestic demand associated with fiscal consolidation”:
IMF economists admit ‘errors’ on austerity policy
All these brilliant men and women had to do was to seriously study what the New Deal did to end the Great Depression in the United States and they would not have pursued such a catastrophic course. But they swallowed whole the right-wing myths that “the-New Deal-didn’t-end-the-Depression; (the-War-did,” and — despite that very proof of Keynsian economics — that “Keynes-has-been-disproven” and then went back to Hoover’s fundamentalist belief in The Market, with similar consequences for Europe.