Economist, Visiting Professor, Lecturer, Writer, Public Speaker.
It seems churlish to say that this was a Budget packed with detail but no overarching strategic vision or plan. It was, after all, billed as a Budget for a seminal moment in the UK. It was coming at the end of the first global pandemic since 1918, and it was the first one in …
Continue reading “Budget 2021: heavy on detail, light on strategy?”
UK government debt is running at £400 billion a year or 20% of GDP. Money supply growth is rising by nearly 14% per annum and the ratio of outstanding debt GDP – 85% of the economy just last year – is set to be around 108% of GDP in the 2020/2021 financial year. Surely that’s …
Continue reading “Why price inflation will remain low even with record debt”
With negative rates in Europe (the ECB deposit rate is -0.5% though the lending rate is zero), Switzerland and Japan, how low can rates go in the UK? The answer is that they can go lower, which means negative. The Bank of England is currently studying how that would work in practice, with the Governor …