Global Financial Database. (From: Eichengreen and O’Rourke (2009)
League of Nations Monthly Bulletin of Statistics. (From : Eichengreen and O’Rourke (2009)
"We made a deliberate decision that in a recession you maintain capital spending throughout and spending on infrastructure ... The evidence is that that is seeing results."
"When people see these results and the action has been taken ... Then I think people will see very clearly the choice between the parties."
(The unelected Leader of the Labour party and ex officio Prime Minister of the United Kingdom).
We can see results Gordon. We can see what must be done. We can see the difference between parties and their policies. But can you? Can you see the size of the repeated upswings last century (that really were green shoots, not the miserable hiccups on today's graphs). Can you see the speed, the almost vertical curve of the collapse this century, how much further we are ahead of the equivalent period last century? Despite the $15 trillion fiscal and monetary, national and international, global stimuli you, as saviour of the world, championed and which you tell us is not enough.
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3 comments:
Gordon was closing in on the Tories last year. His promises to bail out savers, banks, car manufactures, hospitals, investors in Icelandic risk banks etc were making him king. He was even hailed as the saviour of the world.
But what have we got for our spending? {Apart form debt}
Gordon hasn't even managed to buy a few % points in the polls with all these billions.
At 8-9 months in we are where last century it was 22-23 months in. And we're going almost straight down And there's the truly unimaginable government debt that was supposed to avoid the Great Depression.
Detached from reality doesn't begin to describe him. Mr Q, Sir Richard Mottram said it all, only this time it's the country, not just a Department.
The next government must rely on inflation to bring the trillions to mean less in real terms. This is being priced into gilts but unquantifiable factors lurk at large.
On the macro side the Chinese, now appreciating the error of their ways, are investing in US dollars which will assist your graphs to appear encouraging. However, the Chinese no longer want the dollar as the reserve currency; not surprising really and while this is good on one hand as it will hold the US more to account to reduce the subsidies they receive for their standard of living, it could be bad on
the other as an alternative may prove even more unstable and the Americans will resist it at all costs.
Examples of risks closer to home are that swine flu could swipe over 2% of the UK's GDP this year in autumn, the Olympics may have further costing surprises and tax receipts are falling off a cliff. If another global economic crash occurs, Gordon probably couldn't attempt to spend a way out of it which means it would be long and painful, like having Labour in power.
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