In 2009, just before the full outbreak of the global financial crisis, Olivier Blanchard (2009) published an article giving a favourable appraisal of the state of macroeconomics. He came to this verdict on the basis that, after a long period of fierce theoretical debate, the discipline had...

In studies concluding that public debt may hamper GDP, the debt tipping effects are estimated as if there were a single world currency. This means that such studies ignore the likely biggest cause of changes in growth rates, namely damage from exchange rate liquidity shocks because we do not...