Two telling quotes in the Grauniad this morning.
"As Keynes explained, the boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity." That's from one Paul Segal, economics lecturer at the University of Sussex.
And then here's the leader column: "What lies ahead is a recovery built on credit and house prices. Sound familiar?"
Yes, it does. But not from the pages of your newspaper, my friend. Only those with memories of the goldfish variety will have forgotten that the period of growth from 1997 to 2008 was fuelled by credit and rising house prices. What was the Guardian's line then? One of support for Gordon Brown - borrowing only to invest, abolishing Tory boom and bust, and so on. A little mea culpa wouldn't go amiss.
To return to Paul Segal, yes, the true Keynesian calls for central bankers to take away the punch bowl while the party is in full swing. But I don't remember him saying that in the Graun during Brown's glory years. Perhaps that's their fault for not asking him however.
To be fair to the Graun, hardly anyone on the Left was criticising Brown during the long boom. Can you imagine how it would have sounded? Labour MP urges Chancellor to spend less in case bust turns out not to have been abolished after all? A short way to death by deselection. But no such sanction awaited the commentariat, should they have chosen to put pen to paper. They, the new Keynesians, are Keynesians-lite, urging the government to do the easy bit (borrow) now it's too late to do the hard bit (save).
Thankfully it rather looks as if George Osborne has shot their fox. The economy is growing notwithstanding near slump in the Eurozone. The new BoE governor, Mark Carney, has given it a shove in the right direction by telling the markets he won't raise base rates for three years (probably). That should help it along.
Is it the wrong kind of growth? Perhaps. Plenty of people on the Right think that Carney's made a mistake. I'm a little more sanguine. House prices are already ridiculously high. I'm not sure whether there's room to have a repeat of the 2000s. This is true for debt also. How much more can we all borrow?
Osborne could be forgiven for feeling vindicated, both economically and politically, but I have long predicted that Labour would win in 2015. History shows that people are most likely to vote for "progressive" parties when they're feeling good.
