For the best part of 50 years I have listened to politicians who are outside of government telling us that the politicians inside government are misguided/incompetent/useless/corrupt/driving the country to wrack and ruin (select as many options as are applicable). And the politicians who are in government never tire of telling us how the country will…
Following the financial crisis of 2007/08 the UK government needed to inject huge amounts of money into the financial system to prevent it from collapsing. They did this by selling gilts (fancy IOUs) to the Bank of England and using the money to buy back gilts that it had previously sold to financial institutions like…
… THE GOVERNMENT DOESN’T NEED TO TAX OR BORROW TO PAY FOR THE NHS, OR FOR ANYTHING ELSE, EVER! (sorry for shouting but some people really haven’t been paying attention and this is very, very important). Once again, this is how it works. When the government spends, it spends new money. This new money is…
If the UK has another general election this year (or next) Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party will lose. Again. In their euphoria at outperforming everyone’s expectations in the election just past Mr Corbyn and his merry crew appear to have overlooked the fact that they polled the best part of a million votes fewer than the…
A year ago I wrote that “Labour’s *New* Economic Strategy Makes Me Want To Scream”. With frustration, that is, not delight. Last November John McDonnell, Labour’s shiny new shadow chancellor, was telling us that diversification, innovation and public investment were going save us from the dead-end of Tory austerity. Mr. McDonnell appeared to be as…
All of the main political parties in the UK agree that government debt is a bad thing. All of them would like to fund 100% of government spending from taxation alone. There are many respectable economists who will tell you that this phobia of government debt is irrational, and I’m inclined to agree with them,…
All around the world government ministers are obsessed by the size of their deficits: the gap between revenue and spending that can only be filled by borrowing money. This year’s deficit gets added to all of the previous years’ deficits, which accumulate into an ever-expanding mountain of debt. As the debt piles up, so too…
Anyone who’s encouraged by George Osborne’s claims of having steered the UK through the stormy waters of recession into a period of growth that’s “the largest in the G7” needs to read this piece: Comparative Recovery from Flip Chart Fairy Tales. Personally I don’t think GDP is a very useful measure of economic performance but…
Here’s a nice short and easy to read article from Tom Streithorst on the economics of supply and demand that highlights the stupidity of austerity in the midst of a recession. It begins with a little homily on the inevitability of a universal basic income, which is always good to see.
A good article here from Jonathan Portes at The New Statesman about the effect of the UK government’s austerity programme on economic growth, which supports my contention that George Osborne is either an idiot or a liar.
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