IMF tells US to ease Austerity--Apparently Forgetting History of IMF!!

The IMF in June warned the US to ease off of Austerity---while its history has been forcing austerity around the world...

IMF warns Ease Off Spending Cuts to Boost U.S. Recovery  June 14, 2013

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/survey/so/2013/CAR061413A.htm 

http://repository.library.georgetown.edu/handle/10822/552581
""The IMF claims that such austerity measures, although painful to administer, are necessary to correct floundering economies.""

http://www.twnside.org.sg/title/twr137b.htm  
""Not long ago, Argentina was the poster-child for the conservative economic policies pushed by the IMF. The Buenos Aires government privatised state enterprises, liberalised foreign trade and investment, and tightened government fiscal and monetary policy.""

Conditions for IMF loans 

http://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/facts/conditio.htm  

http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/imf-2009-10.pdf 

From page 4       The paper finds that 31 of the 41 agreements contain pro-cyclical macroeconomic policies. These are either pro-cyclical fiscal or monetary policies – or in 15 cases, both – that, in the face of a significant slowdown in growth or in a recession, would be expected to exacerbate the downturn. In some cases, the Fund subsequently relaxed the original conditions; sometimes (as in Hungary, Latvia, Republic of Congo, and Haiti) this appeared to be the result of social unrest or other pressures on the borrowing government. These relaxations of fiscal and monetary policy are noted in the text below, but the original agreements are included in the tally because they still represent, in the authors’ opinion, a policy mistake that may have caused unnecessary economic harm during the time when the policy was in effect.

              In many cases the Fund’s pro-cyclical policies were based on over-optimistic assumptions about economic growth. For example, of the 26 countries that have had at least one review, 11 IMF reports had to lower previous forecasts of real GDP growth by at least 3 percentage points, and three of those had to correct forecasts that were at least 7 percentage points overestimated. Most likely there will be more downward revisions to come.

Page 5      It is also worth noting that the IMF has a history of over-optimistic projections in many countries.6 So it is not so easy to separate forecasting errors from an underlying bias toward overly restrictive fiscal and monetary policies.

IMF: Austerity is much worse for the economy than we thought

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/10/12/imf-austerity-is-much-worse-for-the-economy-than-we-thought/
This matters a lot for policy. If tax hikes and spending cuts only hurt growth a little bit, then a government with debt problems will want to enact some austerity measures.  

But if tax hikes and spending cuts hamper growth significantly, then austerity could be ill-advised. Indeed, if the fiscal multiplier is really, really high in certain situations—such as during a downturn—then austerity could prove counterproductive. Those higher taxes and severe spending cuts will cripple growth so much that the nation will end up with an even bigger deficit than it started out with.

In the 1990s, the fund was famous (or infamous, if you prefer) for ordering countries with debt troubles to tighten their belts.