Recent events have brought to light that a famous research paper by noted economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published in the 2010 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper series contained serious programming, methodological, and statistical errors. Their paper claimed to show that there is a sharp decline in GDP whenever an economy reaches the 90% debt level. Policy makers at the European Commission and in Washington paid heed to these results and formulated real policies such as "debt stabilization" in Europe and the sequester in the USA that have led to sustained high unemployment and weakened economies. But subsequent analyses have shown that no such 90% cliff exists.