Helping such ideas along was the fact that, as Henry Farrell and John Quiggin put it, “There was a significant Keynesian party hidden in the academy,” and it found unexpected allies. Neoclassical economists and fellow travelers who were publicly reassessing their own beliefs during the crisis, such as Martin Feldstein and Richard Posner, joined prominent Keynesian economists such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz in the campaign for stimulus, lending Keynesian ideas a new prestige. Even international economic institutions that were famous for forcing austerity on developing countries, such as the IMF, began to argue that monetary tools were not enough to solve the crisis and that an active and coordinated fiscal policy needed to be applied. Parallel institutions that would shortly mount a counterattack against Keynesian policies and ideas, such as the ECB, largely kept out of the debate at this time, giving the Keynesians the stage. Finally, with the entire global payments system at stake and a “leave it to the market” policy that was untenable since the market was in triage, “governments quickly came to believe that monetary policy was insufficient on its own to help the real economy.”

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 159