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Well, I must say that I think a downturn is simply inevitable. We've been living (and this is true of pretty much all Western economies) way above our means for a long, long time.
It's getting to the point where it's starting to become clear that government debt is never going to be paid back, and when that realisation becomes glaringly obvious to all governments will be unable to borrow more, so they will just print more money, as they have been doing to some extent already.
It's the Weimar Republic all over again, and look at how that turned out. They seem to getting very confused with the difference between actual economic growth and general activity.
If I wash my car, and my neighbour washes his car - the net effect the economy is virtually nothing. However, if I wash my neighbours car, and he washes mine, and we charge each other £ 10 - then the economy has grown by £ 20. We need to look at economics differently.
Frankly, I think historians are going to look back at the 2008 financial crisis and what has happened subsequently, with the same sense of incredulity that we see when we look at the South Sea Company Crash, or the Dutch Tulip Mania. What idiots, they will say, why could they not see where they were headed ?
History can be a brutal teacher.
Frankly, Trump is a side-show in comparison, and along with Russia, they are both very convenient boogeymen to publicly castigate, rather than the potentially more productive, yet uncomfortable self examination that might actually help. |
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Author: Stuart Wright
26-11-2019 01:58:59