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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

‘Pick Your Side. Pick Your History.’

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reflects on the past five years of depression/recession, and what’s to come. Excerpt: There is too much saving and too little consumption in the world to keep growth, and people in jobs. It is the 1930s disease. On this the Keynesians are right. None of this would have been any different if banks […]

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reflects on the past five years of depression/recession, and what’s to come. Excerpt:

There is too much saving and too little consumption in the world to keep growth, and people in jobs. It is the 1930s disease. On this the Keynesians are right.

None of this would have been any different if banks had been saints. The forces at work are tidal in power.

So this is where we are in the summer of 2012. The imbalances are slowly correcting. Wage inflation has eroded Asia’s competitiveness. China’s current account surplus has dropped from 10pc of GDP in 2007 to around 2.5pc this year.

Yet Europe refused to adjust. Germany is still running a surplus of 5.2pc, down from 7.4pc in 2007. The North has refused to offset the demand squeeze in Club Med. Indeed, Germany legislated its own internal squeeze through a balanced budget law and imposed this curse on the rest of Euroland. The effect is to trap Euroland in chronic slump, at least until the victims rebel and take matters into their own hands.

As for our [UK] debt mountain, we have barely begun the great purge. Michala Marcussen from Societe Generale says the healthy level is around 200pc of GDP for advanced economies. If so, we have 100 points to cut.

This cannot be achieved by austerity alone because economic contraction would tip us all into a Grecian vortex. Such a cure is self-defeating.

Much of the debt will have to be written off. Whether this done by inflation (1945-1952) or default (1930-1934) will be the great political battle of this decade. Pick your side. Pick your history.

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