In The Huffington Post, Niall Ferguson covers the downfall Krugmania in the UK.
In August 2011 Krugman returned to the fray with a blog post about the “delusions” of new Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, whose “experiment in austerity” was “going really, really badly.” Three months later, in October 2011, Prime Minister Cameron’s “fantasy” – that fiscal retrenchment was strengthening investor confidence in UK gilts – was given the same contemptuous treatment.
Unfortunately for Krugman, the more he talked about the confidence fairy (as he did here and here and here and here and here and here), the more actual business confidence recovered in the UK. In fact, at no point after May 2010 did it sink back to where it had been throughout the last two years of Gordon Brown’s catastrophic premiership. The low at the end of 2011 (Q4-11 to Q1-12) was followed by lift-off in mid-2012 and a peak in mid-2014.