With the budget coming up next week I've been preparing the evidence to rebut the Chancellor's
porkies. His main theme for some years has been that government debt caused the crisis. (I suppose he hopes that we will forget about the housing boom, sub-prime mortgages, collateralised debt obligations, shadow banking and the general belief that risk had been magicked out of the financial markets.)
I came across some figures for debt in 2008 in an interesting report.* UK government (gross) debt was 52% of GDP, household debt was 101% and firms outside the financial sector had debt of 114% of GDP. I've put the figures on a chart with a few other countries for comparison.
If debt was the problem then was it government who was running it up?
No comments:
Post a Comment