In October 2012, the IMF announced that its forecasts for countries that implemented austerity programs have been consistently overoptimistic, suggesting that tax hikes and spending cuts have been doing more damage than expected and that countries that implemented fiscal stimulus, such as Germany and Austria, did better than expected. These data have been scrutinized by the "Financial Times", which found no significant trends when outliers like Germany and Greece were excluded. Determining the multipliers used in the research to achieve the results found by the IMF was also described as an "exercise in futility" by Professor Carlos Vegh of the University of Michigan. Moreover, Barry Eichengreen of the University of California, Berkeley and Kevin H. O'Rourke of Oxford University write that the IMF's new estimate of the extent to which austerity restricts growth was much lower than historical data suggest.