Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

The coming crash and the slump of 2028

Day after day the newspapers are full of reports about problems with the banks. The £ continues to fall. The US dollar likewise. Every few days another skeleton falls out of the cupboard. This is the beginning of the next big crash. Some commentators say that it will be worse than 1929. I would not go so far as to suggest that but will not be surprised.

On 16 September last year I wrote ON THE ROCKS, about the Northern Rock collapse and THIS about the likely consequences.

It gives me no pleasure to see the predictions coming to pass. This is no mere crisis of confidence but something happening in the real economy. Expect to see vacant sites, boarded-up shops, closed factories, growing unemployment and all the other marks of a full-blown depression. It was all avoidable. Indeed, any country following the right policies could have spared itself much of the misery. But the time to act would have been ten years ago.

The right policies applied now could get any country that did so into recovery quite quickly, but to prevent the slump of 2028 the time to act is between now and 2018, after which it too will be inevitable. But if the comments being made by politicians and journalists are indicative of the general state of understanding of what is happening, it would be prudent to pencil in the date of the next recession after this one.

Kommentarer

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

Importing people to sustain demand

I got involved in a discussion with a Youtuber called “Philosophy all along”. This was in connection with criticism of Trump’s policy of deporting illegal migrants, which he argued would be bad for the economy as it would reduce demand. This implies that there is a need to import people to sustain demand. There is no obvious reason why a population should not be able to consume everything that the same population produces. If it can not, then something else is going on. It is a basic principle that wages are the least that workers will accept to do a job. Wages are a share of the value added by workers through their wages. The remainder is distributed as economic rent, after government has taken its cut in taxes. Monopoly profit is a temporary surplus that after a delay gets absorbed into economic rent. Land values in Silicon Valley are an example of this; it's like a gold rush. The miners get little out of it. Rent and tax syphon purchasing power away from those who produce the g...

The Zombie Train that refuses to die

The Guardian has published a couple more articles against HS2, one by specialist rail commentator Christian Wolmar, and another today by journalist Simon Jenkins. The main arguments in favour will doubtless be wheeled out by the commentators: the need for capacity and the disruption caused by upgrading existing routes. HST itself will severely disrupt services to Euston during the construction period. Capacity can be increased at a fraction of the cost by a variety of measures, provided that it is accepted that the additional traffic will run at existing speeds. It is not generally known that the Midland main line is, or was, four track all the way from London to Trent Junction, between Nottingham and Derby. This is because the additional tracks are separate, having been added for coal trains which trundled down to Brent sidings, on the edge of London, from a collection point at Toton in Nottinghamshire, where the Midland Railway build a huge marshalling yard. Beyond Derby, the main l...

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...