"Business-Cycle Economists further argue that it’s important to bear in mind that in a dangerous world like ours, it’s always safer not to spend money than to spend. And so, when times are tough, people don’t take chances. They hang on to their cash. This makes recessions even more severe and is consistent with the idea that interest rates are of little concern to firms or consumers in the midst of a downturn.
Business-Cycle Economists thus see economic downturns as a much more fundamental problem than Establishment Economists and one that will not fix itself. What can we do? For one, when the private sector is too scared to spend, we can have the government do so instead. The United States was the only nation to undertake a stimulus program on the scale of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. While Business-Cycle Economists think that it could have been better planned and focused, they nevertheless see this as a major reason that our economy has recovered much more substantially than those in Europe.
Second, Business-Cycle Economists are strongly in favor of a more even income distribution, closer to what we had several decades ago. We need people to spend, not save.
This means strengthening the middle class because they are the real job creators, not the wealthy. This will in turn make recessions less frequent and less severe.
Third, they view the current level of competition in the non-financial and especially financial industries as inadequate. Under capitalism, the ideal is what economists call consumer sovereignty. What that means is that firms are so competitive with each other that they are forced to please their customers or die. Consumers become the sovereigns, so to speak. But, since the relaxation of antitrust regulations in the 1980s, we have been witness to increasing levels of monopolization. This has shifted the balance of power away from those who should really be determining the direction of our economy, i.e., the consumers, and it has created an anti-democratic concentration of power. This trend must be reversed if we are to create a healthy and profitable environment for consumers and entrepreneurs."
http://www.forbes.com/sites/johntharvey/2016/02/22/evaluating-the-evaluators/3/#1cda71ff204b