Friday, May 27, 2011

More Effects of Austerity in the UK

Here’s something for the Chancellor and the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) to chew on: a warning from Dr Tim Morgan, the global head of research at Tullett Prebon, that the deficit reduction plan won’t work and the UK is headed for a debt disaster.

Morgan says sectors that account for nearly 60 per cent of UK economic output are critically dependent on debt (public or private) and set to contract rather than expand. This will render economic growth implausible and means the burden of public and private debt will prove too heavy for the nation to carry:

Over the past decade, the British economy has been critically dependent on private borrowing and public spending. Now that these drivers have disappeared – private borrowing has evaporated, and the era of massive public spending expansion is over – the outlook for growth is exceptionally bleak.

Sectors which depend upon either private borrowing or public spending now account for at least 58% of economic output. These sectors are now set to contract rather than expand, which renders aggregate economic growth implausible. And, without growth, there may be no way of avoiding a debt disaster.

...Short of almost unthinkably drastic restructuring, there may be no way out of Britain’s low-growth, high-debt trap.

2 comments:

More debt is not the answer; the worst scenario is higher interest rates because no one wants to buy your debt. There are plenty of examples in Europe and then there is NO EXIT. Austerity is the only answer once you have borrowed too much. What you are saying is also true in the United States all growth for some 10 years or more has come from debt instead of core growth.

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The Street Light is written by economist Kash Mansori, who works as an economic consultant (though views expressed here are entirely his own), writes whenever he can in his spare time, and teaches a bit here and there. You can contact him by writing to the gmail account streetlightblog. (More about Kash.)