The IMF, the night of the undead and the Rocky Horror Show.

In 2010 the IMF admitted that the 2008 crisis

has exposed flaws in the precrisis policy framework, forced policymakers to explore new policies during the crisis, and forces us to think about the architecture of postcrisis macroeconomic policy.

Sounded like an admission of guilt, sort of. It is worth remembering that the IMF's

primary purpose is to ensure the stability of the international monetary system—the system of exchange rates and international payments that enables countries (and their citizens) to transact with one other.

In 2011 the IMF reviewed the year and their policies, inluding austerity

First, post the 2008-09 crisis, the world economy is pregnant with multiple equilibria—self-fulfilling outcomes of pessimism or optimism, with major macroeconomic implications

Pregnant with multi equilibria - not a particularly happy prognosis, is it?

Paul Krugman points to one of Blanchard's equilibria as being particularly worrisome, the one about investors wanting both growth and austerity (the Blanchard diagnosis of such an equilibria is schizophrenia)

Some preliminary estimates that the IMF is working on suggest that it does not take large multipliers for the joint effects of fiscal consolidation and the implied lower growth to lead in the end to an increase, not a decrease, in risk spreads on government bonds. 

Krugman observes that

If I have this right, Olivier is suggesting that harsh austerity programs may be literally self-defeating, hurting the economy so much that they worsen fiscal prospects.

In his latest chapter of Zombie Economics Australian Professor John Quiggin writes that the

failure of expansionary austerity is already evident. Predictions that, once the state got out of the way, the private sector would come roaring back, have proved laughably false. After more than a year of austerity in the US and Europe, there is no sign of any recovery. Rather, the risk of another crash looms larger than ever.  

Expansionary austerity is not simply a zombie economic idea. It forms the basis of a political strategy of class war, undertaken by the financial and political elite (the “1 per cent”) to hold on to the wealth and power they accumulated during the decades of market liberalism, and to shift the costs of their own failure on to the rest of the population.

...

The struggle against the politics of austerity will be a long one, and often dispiriting.  As the experience of the 1920s and 1930s showed, the forces pushing for austerity are powerful. Nonetheless, they were defeated in the end, by the New Deal in the US, the Attlee Labour government in the UK, and the success of social democratic movements and policies in Europe