Yes they do. I have heard a statement that bugs me a lot lately and that statement is that this was the go to analysis for the Republicans as if Democrats have never referred to it in any way. I'm here to say that is complete BS and we know this now. The Sequester created by the WH and passed in a bipartisan way, was based on Reinhart and Rogoff's BS analysis about scary scary long term debt to GDP ratios like their offer to cut Social Security.
So let's stop pretending this is only coming from Republicans, especially with the Obama administration using deficit lies and errors to come after Social Security. Reinhart and Rogoff's complete methodology was BS and neither of them understand the nuanced difference between countries with a sovereign currency; fixed exchange rates and floating exchange rates; gold standard countries and those with a fiat currency and how that relates to reserve banking at the Fed and our private current account and trade balance within. So therefore it skews the mean and amounts to garbage methodology even if done correctly.
I love How Mike Norman puts it. It kind of reminds me of how I would say it; those of you that are familiar with my work.
There's a solid account tying the Obama administration directly to the work of Reinhart and Rogoff. You will learn more about this below the fold.
Everyone knows by now the story of the Reinhart and Rogoff Errors in their Excel spreadsheet and general flawed methodologies regarding their widely cited paper supporting austerity since it was first brought to our attention by Mike Konzcal. This was of course brought to Konzcal's attention by Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts. They outlined from the data they got their hands on that it excluded five countries, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, and Denmark from the analysis.
Because of that, everyone knows including these countries would make the average growth 2.2% not -'0.1 percent as published by Reinhart and Rogoff, and that's still imagining if their orthodox deficit terrorist economic exercise in complete non peer reviewed BS was done correctly. It wasn't. Their whole methodology was and is complete crap and so is their work. This is best outlined by the Brilliant MMT economist at the UMKC L. Randall Wray.
But it was all a lie. Yes, a lie. They screwed up their data analysis. Like so many times before--think Larry Summers at Harvard, Chicago's Gene Fama, or Charles Plosser at the University of Rochester--the economists reach results counter to intuition and the real world.I highly recommend reading that paper from Randy Wray and Yeva Nersisyanas; it completely destroys the POS book and paper Reinhart and Rogoff wrote; their overall crap methodologically; and their crap averages of economic data they couldn't even begin to understand. The Obama administration classifies as debt hysterians now because they rely on this complete BS to cause the most vulnerable in our society pain. This is, of course, a fact everyone has learned recently though some of us have known it for a long time.Their work doesn't pass the smell test: if it smells like nonsense it probably is nonsense.
Yeva Nersisyan (my brilliant student and coauthor) and I critiqued their book soon after it came out; see here: http://www.levyinstitute.org/.... To put our conclusions as simply as possible, we concluded that they didn't know what they are talking about.
They argued that "high" government debt ratios--say, 90% of GDP--nearly invariably lead to slow growth and to financial crisis. Our debt hysterians took that and ran--using their book as justification for austerity.
We noticed that their data just did not add up. Leave to the side the silliness of simply aggregating across 8 centuries of experience, and adding up debt ratios of countries as disparate as the USA today or, say, Greece in 1932, let alone some feudal state operating on a gold standard a couple of hundred years ago. As I've remarked, any real historian would find the methodology ludicrous.
For instance, despite whether I agree with everyone at CAF(I don't, especially on the foreclosure fraud settlement) I generally do respect some of Richard J. Eskow's work, and he did visit the White House back in 2010 when this whole debacle I predicted was in its beginning stages. His first hand account of this meeting and run in with outgoing Treasury Secretary Tim Giethner will disgust anyone with a conscience and a brain. It proves that it happened, with sources, and that the Obama administration touted and relied on the Reinhart and Rogoff Errors so they could push austerity including the sequester.