True to Lyndon LaRouche’s remarks that no one could win a Nobel Prize for Economics whose work had not been a forecasting failure and produced disastrous results, Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford, both originally graduate products of MIT and subsequently professors at Stanford University and at Columbia University, were today announced as winners of that dubious prize. The two earned their reputation for the shortest-term analyses of “microeconomic” decisions of households and businesses in their millions, responding to the clues in “forward guidance” utterances of the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee and other central bank agencies. LaRouche, by contrast, was an unmatched forecaster of the long-term results of fundamental changes in economic policies, and an economic scientist designing those long-term policies which produced sustained economic growth, “expanded reproduction,” of nations acting in cooperation.

Various reports today, in Reuters, for example, emphasize that Hall and Woodford deserve the notorious Nobel for recognizing that from the 1970s onward, “standard Keynesian models” for central bank action on currencies and interest rates no longer worked. They did not, however, recognize the action on which LaRouche was able to make the first of his famous long-term forecasts, namely the “Nixon Shock” of Aug. 15, 1971, when the United States ended the gold-reserve character of the Bretton Woods post-World War II monetary system. Nor did the 1990s end of Glass-Steagall bank separation matter to their “model.” All the while, LaRouche’s 1971 forecast of decades of economic decline, wars, even fascism, was being borne out. Nor did Hall or Woodford notice the approach of the 2008 financial crash and Great Recession, as LaRouche famously did during a July 2007 public webcast.

Hall’s and Woodford’s professional work is lauded by the Swedish committee for supposed aid to central banks planning their “forward guidance” on month-to-month monetary policy, encouraging households and businesses in their immediate investment behavior, speculations, and consumption. As CNBC described the Swedish Academy’s thinking in awarding Hall and Woodford this year, “Their work has shown the importance of central banks and governments communicating their policy plans, which can influence this view of the future and move the economy in the right direction. On the basis of these models, well-timed fiscal and monetary policy measures can reduce the economy’s peaks and troughs.”

So the lost decade of QE and economic stagnation, 2009-2019, was a Hall and Woodford success, followed by an even bigger surge of QE and inflation lasting until late 2022, and then several years of alternating interest rate increases and inflation, through all of which households have been led by “forward guidances” of the Federal Reserve.

Let us instead be “forward-guided” for the long-term, by LaRouche’s Four Laws to save the U.S. economy, and by Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s Ten Principles for a new development and security architecture for the post-Colonial world order.