Published on Anne Pettifor’s Debtonation website, this short piece argued that the US and other governments had vastly underestimated the size of the ‘stimulus’ needed to get their countries out of the 2008 recession. It criticised the common view that the US recovery stemmed from the New Deal and showed that the real source of the recovery was US wartime government investement, amounting to nearly 50% of GDP at its height.