Martin is on book leave until January Read more
What is to be done? This question has to be asked of UK economic policy. Only the complacent can be satisfied with what is happening. Yes, the 1 per cent increase in third-quarter gross domestic product is welcome. But GDP stagnated over four quarters and was 3.1 per cent lower than in the first quarter of 2008.
I remain convinced that the decision to move towards fiscal austerity so sharply in 2010 was a huge error. A salient aspect of the mistake was that the UK reinforced the move towards austerity in the EU. In an article entitled “Self-defeating austerity?” published in the October National Institute Economic Review, Dawn Holland and Jonathan Portes argue that UK GDP could well be 4.3 per cent lower this year and 5 per cent lower in 2013 than it would have been without these consolidation programmes, including the UK’s. Moreover, in 2013 the UK’s ratio of public sector debt to GDP might be 5 percentage points higher than it would have been without the co-ordinated contraction. This is a step forward and maybe two steps back.
I entered into a heated US debate last week on whether the recovery has been surprisingly slow and, if so, whether the policies of Barack Obama’s administration bear responsibility for that outcome. In particular, I was responding to a post by John Taylor of Stanford University, a distinguished macroeconomist and adviser to Mitt Romney, who had argued that the recovery was exceptionally weak.
Prof Taylor has responded to my reply. In this response, he makes four points.
First, he argues that if we exclude the recoveries in 1973, 1981 and 1990 from the analysis, the gap between the average US recovery and the current recovery becomes even bigger. Read more
Martin is on book leave until October Read more
I have argued in previous posts that the policy of letting the government deficits offset the natural post-crisis austerity of the private sector makes excellent sense, provided the country in question has a solvent government. I have argued, too, in the most recent post, that the objections to this policy are not decisive. What matters is making the best of bad alternatives.
Yet let us also look at alternative ways of accelerating deleveraging. Broadly there are two: capital transactions and default. The latter, in turn, comes in two varieties: plain vanilla default and inflationary default. Read more
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