…apparently is Pete Peterson.  He is behind the curtain to economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart’s seriously flawed work that advocated austerity measures:  http://www.prwatch.org/NODE/12065

From the article:

Reinhart, described glowingly by the New York Times as “the most influential female economist in the world,” was a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics founded, chaired, and funded by Peterson. Reinhart is listed as participating in many Peterson Institute events, such as their 2012 fiscal summit along with Paul Ryan, Alan Simpson, and Tim Geithner, and numerous other Peterson lectures and events available on YouTube. She is married to economist and author Vincent Reinhart, who does similar work for the American Enterprise Institute, also funded by the Peterson Foundation.

Kenneth Rogoff is listed on the Advisory Board of the Peterson Institute. The Peterson Institute bankrolled and published a 2011 Rogoff-Reinhart book-length collaboration, “A Decade of Debt,” where the authors apparently used the same flawed data to reach many of the same conclusions and warn ominously of a “debt burden” stretching into 2017 that “will weigh heavily on the public policy agenda of numerous advanced economies and global financial markets for some time to come.” (Note that not everyone associated with the Institute touts the Peterson party line.)

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Reinhart, a senior fellow at Peterson’s Institute and married to an economist also funded by Peterson.  Um-hmmm….

Rogoff, on the advisory board for Peterson.  (things that make your head spin…)

Yep.

(Stephen Colbert covered this, too.  He had Herndon on the show to explain how they discovered the errors.  Herndon is an econ student who was assigned to replicate someone’s study.  He chose Rogoff and Reinhart’s work, and to his surprise, could not replicate it.  Previously, they refused to share their data with others asking to see it, but gave it to Herndon, who found the flawed research that omitted countries that were against the Rogoff and Reinhart hypothesis.)