full employment policies. It was a period devoid of systemic financial crises. The reality is that it made it hard for external deficit nations to sustain full employment and collapsed because it was unworkable -- throwing all the adjustment onto deficit nations and forcing them to be continually contracting their domestic economies. The problem now is that the neo-liberal paradigm was not killed off in 2008 and in re-asserting itself (at the wrong time) -- we have the worst of all worlds. Growth is slowing because spending growth is inadequate because the conservatives have declared fiscal policy a failure -- "see, it had its chance" -- and monetary policy "had its chance but cannot move any further" and so -- according to the mantra -- the only thing that we can do now is swallow the bitter pill. A problem with this is that the ones who are telling us all this will not be the ones who swallow the bitter pill. The tenured academics and those on sinecures from the likes of Peter G. Peterson who are making the most noise will not lose a bean and will probably swoop on the reduced real estate bargains that will emerge if the economy further contracts. The other problem is that the confidence everyone placed in monetary policy was itself a reflection of neo-liberal bias which had convinced us that fiscal policy was ineffective and monetary policy should be the main counter-stabilisation policy weapon and then only to control inflation because