Austerity as a principle I think has an important foundation, but one has to qualify it by the context you find yourself in. My own sense of it is that the more important thing, and I mentioned this earlier, is to have a credible plan around the fiscal future. That is what markets find reassuring. It's what taxpayers find reassuring.
Given the context we found ourselves in, almost every government on earth in 2008, 2009, and 2010 found that it would be the wrong day to practise austerity. That's a good thing, because as I said before, we had all the ingredients of a second global depression there and we avoided it through smart policy-making.
What the debate enters into is when is the right time to get things back on track. Given the cycle, it is possible to figure out whether, cyclically adjusted, you are still on an austerity plan. I think that's the OECD method of figuring out where you are relative to your plan. You may have a fiscal deficit, but if you adjust for the business cycle in your economy, actually it's a cyclical or cyclically adjusted structural surplus or balance, which means that your plan is on track. I think that kind of tool is very helpful to help others understand what is the net effect on the economy. We're not experts on that. We take that as an input to our forecast.
Just to give more of a round thing around that question, you simply can't look at it as the knife edge: do we practise austerity today or do we wait one more year? Those are questions that boil down to how every country is different and every situation is different.