Austerity is collecting a lot of high-flying enemies these days. In the past month the manager of PIMCO, the largest bond-buying firm in the world, top figures at Blackrock, one of the most influential investment banks in the world, the President of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, and Martin Wolf, world-renowned finance commentator for the Financial Times, have all come out vigorously against austerity.

Meanwhile, a recent IMF report shows (again) in painstaking econometric detail that some of the most influential European research purporting to show the merits of “expansionary austerity,” and which showed up in ECB reports, basically cooked its books. Most embarrassing of all, a famous paper by Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, quoted by austerians as diverse as the EC’s Olli Rehn and the US’ Paul Ryan, has been shown to be based on bad data, dodgy assumptions, and a basic inability to use Microsoft Excel. Suddenly the sado-monetarists look less like a counter-revolutionary fiscal vanguard and more like petty crewmen busily rearranging their intellectual deck chairs while the rest run for the anti-austerity lifeboats.

For anyone who wants to know the origins and intellectual foundations of the wavering austerity crowd, Mark Blyth’s devastating new book, Austerity: History of a Dangerous Idea, is one-stop shopping. Unlike most previous critics, Blyth’s angle of attack is not rapier thrusts into the heart of this or that pro-austerity paper, it is an all-out, search-and-destroy mission against every argument these latter-day financial terrorists have mustered.