Business Confidence 'Improving'

Generali

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

I'll be the first person to cheer a smaller state and lower taxes.

But trying to engineer a contraction of the state at the same time that you have a global recession pummelling the private sector, causing rising unemployment, and with the credit crunch forcing households to deleverage, is economically illiterate.

You can't cut your way out of a recession. It simply doesn't work.

Maybe. The British economy seems to be doing a lot better than many, especially given that she shared a lot of the same problems as the PIIGS.

Ultimately it's impossible to say who's right as there isn't a second parallel Britain that we can experiment on. Still it's pretty obvious to me that I'm right:D

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

Generali wrote: »

Maybe. The British economy seems to be doing a lot better than many,

And a lot worse than many as well.

especially given that she shared a lot of the same problems as the PIIGS.

Now that's more than a little hyperbolic.

No country that issues debt in it's own currency, and retains control over it's own monetary policy, shares the main problems of the PIIGS.

Ultimately it's impossible to say who's right as there isn't a second parallel Britain that we can experiment on. Still it's pretty obvious to me that I'm right:D

For a moment there I thought Mrs McT had hijacked your account.

Rinoa

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

Of all the things to dislike about Labour, and there are plenty of them, going into this recession with one of the lowest debt to GDP ratio's in the G20 and a debt to GDP ratio lower than at all times but a few decades out of the last 400 years wouldn't be high on the list of most rational people.

You've been duped by 'Labour Speak'. Spectator recently looked at this:

The New Statesman today publishes a splendid centenary edition, to celebrate its 100 years — a collectors’ item. It also carries some vintage blame-dodging by Tony Blair who pretends 13 years of Labour rule was not responsible for the mess we’re still in. Overspending is not to blame for the debt crisis, he says. It’s nonsense on first reading, of course: what else creates a debt crisis, rather than overspending? Bad weather? A bad debt fairy? Blair claims that Labour need to be ‘very robust in knocking down the notion that it “created” the crisis’. Here are his words, some of them flatly untrue:

‘Labour should be very robust in knocking down the notion that it “created” the crisis. In 2007/2008 the cyclically adjusted current Budget balance was under 1 per cent of GDP. Public debt was significantly below 1997.’

The following graphs give the lie to this nonsense. The first is what he doesn’t mention. The IMF has recently confirmed that the prosperity that Labour prided itself on was in fact a debt-fuelled illusion. But crucially, it has also confirmed that 2007 was the worst year for economic overheating since at least the 1970s. Blair knows the toxicity of this claim: he accused the Tories of ‘boom and bust’. The IMF data is now clear: he was the master of boom and bust. Never was there more egregious overheating, or a bigger dive, than under Labour’s disastrous economic stewardship:

2007 was indeed the mother of all crack-up booms - we were fooling ourselves, it was all a Labour illusion.

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2013/04/tony-blair-cant-escape-blame-for-the-debt/