Back to talking about the economy again I’m afraid, and you know it’s got bad when even the BBC have noticed something’s wrong (H/T Penny Dreadful). Sadly it seems that the terribly dangerous deflation we should all worry about hasn’t happened, instead by printing a metric truck load of cash we’ve got inflation. Which really wasn’t much of a surprise to anyone, and at least we can inflate our debt (which ok screws over all of us that can’t just vote ourselves a pay rise) but at least the countries credit rate isn’t heading rapidly towards junk status like say Greece. Greece being in the unenviable position of having a tanking economy, a populace that doesn’t like cuts and a rapidly dwindling set of people that will lend them money. Oh and being part of the Euro they can’t easily default or devalue their currency, and the great and good in Brussels are really not keen on people leaving the Euro. So with belts tightening all round where will their next bail out come from? Why the IMF of course as we’ve just terribly generously agreed to pay them an extra 9 billion pounds in membership fees next year. With cuts being such a hot topic this was of course agreed to in parliament by means of a Statutory Instrument and so won’t ever get debated – much simpler that way.
Still it’s not all gloom we’re told that by the next parliament we’ll stop giving £280 million a year to India in aid. Which given the aid they give to Africa, the nuclear and space programs they probably won’t miss all that much. Which still leaves the puzzle of how when we’re borrowing more money every day our politicians don’t calculate the amount of money we have spare to give away as zero. Never fear though the EU has sprung to our aid in response to our Government actually saying they were disappointed at the EU wanting even more money Guy Verhofstadt has suggested we could save money by just letting the EU take over everything (officially). To help that “saving” along the majority of MEP’s just voted in favour of the EU getting more money, and being able to tax us directly.
All that said if we could actually just get our glorious leaders to stop giving away money we don’t have, to support institutions we neither want nor need, things could actually be looking up as unemployment has (reportedly) peaked, and manufacturing may be still increasing. We could maybe even stop spending money trying to prevent global warming as it looks like a mini ice age is more likely. Now if the our learned representatives would only consider doing soemthign sensible with tax things could actually improve.
Of course I doubt if even William Hill would give you odds on that happening.
