Gestalt flip or gestalt flip-flop? The impact of the Great Crash on fiscal policy assumptions in the IMF

This paper contributes to ongoing debates surrounding the impact of the Great Crash on change or continuity in fiscal policy assumptions in the IMF, and in doing so, foregrounds two variables that have been given short shrift in the existing literature: the multiple levels of economic ideas; and the dynamic, evolving, multi-phase nature of moments of political-economic failure. Drawing on this nuanced appreciation of the complexities and dimensions of moments of uncertainty, the central argument of this paper is that notwithstanding the beginnings of a potential gestalt flip during the most acute phase of the Great Crash, the IMF nevertheless remains a long way from jettisoning prior orthodoxies, despite some evidence of inter-paradigm borrowing in response to concerns of secular stagnation in advanced economies.