Sunak should be modelling his fiscal rules on Clem Attlee’s, not Margaret Thatcher’s
Normally, reading economic statistics is, for almost everybody, a sure-fire way of curing insomnia. Not anymore. The Office for National Statistics came out with yet another attention-grabber last week. Government debt in the UK, the august body pronounced, is now bigger than GDP for the first time in over 60 years. The statisticians did qualify […]
It’s time to go back to basics and go about fixing our deficit before more tax cuts
As inflation pushes prices further and further up, food has been getting more expensive for some time. But, as the cliche goes, there was never such a thing as a free lunch. This idea, well known among economists, means prosperity depends upon making the effort to raise productivity. These are concepts which Western electorates are […]
A windfall tax raised by a money-hungry government will scare off our businesses
Rishi Sunak’s windfall tax on energy firms – what he called a “temporary targeted profits levy” – has gone down well with voters. The tax makes it look like money is raised from someone else and given to them through subsidies to their bills. Despite claims that the tax will yield an additional £5bn in […]
Longer lockdown based on hypotheticals would come with serious economic costs
The penny is finally beginning to drop. The health service’s focus on giving absolute priority to the treatment of Covid-19 generates costs and problems on a massive scale. Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, has warned of the huge pressures on the NHS from the backlog of non-Covid cases. Many of these are life-threatening […]
Britain is more optimistic about Brexit than gloomy forecasts suggest
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is up to its usual tricks. Last week, it predicted a two-year recession in the UK in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Even in the main forecast, involving a mild Brexit, GDP was projected to grow by only 1.2 per cent this year and 1.4 per cent in 2020. […]
A ray of light in these dark days: Living standards have risen far more than we think
The media seems full of gloom at the moment. Chaos over Brexit, Saudi Arabia, potential nuclear escalation between the US and Russia – you name it, people are worried about it. A ray of light is shone – an apt phrase as you will see – by the work of Bill Nordhaus, a Yale economist […]
Cautious corporates sitting on hoards of cash are to blame for our slow recovery
The slow recovery since the financial crisis remains a dominant issue in both political and economic debate. The economy has definitely revived since 2009, the depth of the recession, in both Britain and America. The average annual growth in real GDP has been very similar, at 2.0 and 2.1 per cent respectively. This is much […]
Britain’s debt dilemma: Not too high, not too low or the UK economy risks disaster
The Bank of England Financial Policy Committee (FPC) has signalled that it has become worried again about debt. Its specific focus is households. Consumer credit, for example, grew by 10 per cent during 2016, far faster than the economy as a whole. A lot of household debt is in the form of a mortgage, so there is […]
What Dirty Harry tells us about economic forecasters’ Michael Fish moment
Economic forecasters are in the dock. Last week, none other than the chief economist of the Bank of England, Andy Haldane, was confessing the crimes of the profession. The failure to predict the financial crisis was, Haldane said, economic forecasting’s “Michael Fish” moment. Thirty years ago, the BBC weatherman predicted that the UK would avoid […]
Why the economic picture tends to be rosier than initial estimates suggest
One of the surprises of last week was the Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimate of economic growth in the second quarter of 2016, the period from April to the end of June. In the run up to Brexit, the economy expanded by 0.6 per cent on the first quarter of the year. This was […]
