It will be a relatively short blog today as I am off travelling again. Yes, I was home one day! Real GDP gaps, which measure the extent to which economies are producing below their potential (indicated by full employment of labour and existing capital resources), remain large across many of the large advanced economies. That means one thing – current output growth is not strong enough given the real resources available to these nations. It means another thing – that potential growth will start to fall as investments in productive capital and human capital falters as a result of the lack of demand for current output. Given current capacity (labour and capital), the utilisation of it depends on spending and spending alone. That means another thing. Policies that deliberately undermine the current demand for output will not help economies to exit this crisis. So the only debate worth having is how to stimulate spending and that leaves all the discussions about the need for fiscal austerity on the sidelines of irrelevance. At what point will the economists supporting austerity realise that?