One would reasonably think that if someone had been exposed in the past for pumping out a discredited academic paper after being at the forefront of the destructive austerity push during the Global Financial Crisis, then some circumspection might be in order. Apparently not. In 2010, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published a paper in one of the leading mainstream academic journals – Growth in a Time of Debt – which became one of the most cited academic papers at the time. At the time, they even registered a WWW domain for themselves (now defunct) to promote the paper and tell us all how many journalists, media programs etc have been citing their work. While one can understand the self-promotion by Rogoff and Reinhart, it seems that none of these media outlets or journalists did much checking. It turned out that they had based their results on research that had grossly mishandled the data – deliberately or inadvertently – and that a correct use of the available data found that that nations who have public debt to GDP ratios that cross the alleged 90 per cent threshold experienced average real GDP growth of 2.2 per cent rather than -0.1 per cent as was published by Rogoff and Reinhart in their original paper. So all their boasting about finding robust “debt intolerance limits” arising from “sharply rising interest rates” – and then “painful fiscal adjustments” and “outright default” were not sustainable. Humility might have been the order of the day. But not for Rogoff. He regularly keeps popping up making predictions of doom based on faulty mainstream logic.