The core thesis of the paper is that taking a close look at the actual statistics available from Eurostat on the PIIGS-countries plus Cyprus, one finds little empirical evidence that the governments there have de facto reduced their total public expenditures. This is in stark contrast to the current austerity debate, which seemingly implicitly assumes that austerity has occurred over the past couple of years since the global Great Economic Crisis broke out in 2008. Therefore the author calls this empirical finding the austerity paradox. Many critics of the austerity policy of the current EU-member countries turn to this fact a blind eye. They point to the paradox of thrift as Keynes has named the contradiction that attempts to bring down a public deficit accomplished the opposite. Hayek instead pointed out the opposite weaknesses related to extensive public deficit spending and extreme low nominal interest rates which leads to significant malinvestments in end, since the long-run interest rate will sooner or later return to its long-term market value. Furthermore the paper gives empirical evidence about the outcomes of the ECB monetary support given to the crisis countries combined with the EFSM/EFSF/ESM together with the IMF as has been recently made public by the ECB and the German Ministry of Finance. [...]