With large current account and budget deficits, that long-term economic plan of promoting savings, investment and exports is very much a work in progress.
We should never forget Herbert Stein’s Law – “if something cannot go on forever, it will stop”.
This year’s payments will surpass the Transport, Home Office, Justice and Energy budgets combined.
It is a costly fiscal transfer from the broad body of taxpayers to the rich and old.
The Chancellor must be hoping that something will. A decade of sluggish growth on the Continent is hardly good for Britain’s prospects.
Thatcherite on the economy and Europe. Macmillanite on housing and saving. Carswellian on governance – but lacking popular input on constitutional reform.
“It’s not my money, it’s your money, this is the money of people who have worked hard and saved hard.”
George Osborne faces a very special temptation – an opportunity to pull the mother of all fiscal fast ones
There are lessons for today from the rise and fall of the “Lords of Finance” in the 1920s. Risk has been continually mispriced during recent years.
Why should the ministers and senior civil servants responsible for the ruin of nations be able to get away it?
Indeed, the alternative policy I advocated at the time is now…the policy throughout the world as to how to deal with the next crisis.
Using loose monetary policy to revive a moribund economy is a bit like getting your guests drunk at a party – no one joins in unless other people are joining in
The Bank’s own figures showed that QE has cost the poorest 10 per cent £779 each while benefiting the top 10 per cent by over £30,000.
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