Nobel prize winner (Economics) says UK economy best in Europe!
 

And you cannot get higher praise than that! :cool:

Thank goodness we have such a good government to steer us though this world recession :thumb:

BBC NEWS | Business | UK's economy is 'best in Europe'

Boll*x...the IMF says the opposite: I know who I trust, and it ain't a Nobel prize winner ;)

If this bearded tosser was so chuffing great he would have seem this economic meltdown coming years ago in the first place.


Leave labour in power and watch them deal with rising oil prices and double digit inflation

Cause the IMF has done such a wonderful job regulating the worlds economy hasn't it :lol1:

No, it's done nothing to try to prevent or reverse/push out of the world recession. All the work has been done by certain countries, mainly the UK and US.

I agree with the OP .... ---Edited by webteam---

It is what I have said for ages - hate Labour as I do, they are without doubt the best for the current climate.

Krugman said he has “no idea” what will power the U.S. out of recession.

For a World class economist he doesnt know much.....

That says more about the state of the US economy than his finance minded prowess.

So when this happens will all the SN massive who said the opposite and bash Labour every time an MP farts accept that they were wrong? :lol1:

The election will be interesting on here ..... you will have two camps:-

1. The Labour camp - the economy will be firing on all cylinders and the reason is that Brown took strong choices which worked.

2. The Tory camp - desperately trying to get a Policy which will be popular without being shown that it cannot be done.

It's going to be closer than anyone thinks .... maybe a Lib-Lab Government?

didnt the imf say that the uk was in a good postion to recover strongly ? but i still hate gordon brown

The election will be interesting on here ..... you will have two camps:-

1. The Labour camp - the economy will be firing on all cylinders and the reason is that Brown took strong choices which worked.

2. The Tory camp - the economy will still be ****ed and the reason is that Brown has been at the financial helm for over a decade.

Do you think that alternative policies by Labour/Brown could have prevented the UK from entering the recession?

Undoubtedly the recession could have been limited by better regulation of our banking system which the government did sweet FA about. Continual waste of money through poor policy and execution in the private sector wasted a huge amount of resources better spent on things other than ID cards, invasion of our privacy under the name of terror prevention and the various other utter b0lloX this government has wasted billions on.

Would someone else have done a better job - the reality is that is quite possible. I doubt many other people would have sold of our gold reserves at an all time low price !


AllanB

We will never know if someone else could have done better, somehow - I doubt that they could have.

We all enjoyed the most fantastic growth of wealth and lifestyles - more than at any time in our history, under Labour.

Yes, it seems that most of that wealth was borrowed .... but I cannot remember anyone on here begging to have their living standards cut over the past decade!

Pete, in this country, I would be amazed if 1 in 100 people knew that the improved living standard was all based on borrowed money.

I am double sure that our children will certainly be aware it was borrowed money when they are paying an astronomical rate to pay for the "labour debts".

What? SN is finance central :lol1: You can count on one had the people on here who actually saved up their own money to buy/mod their cars/houses.

What that report fails to mention is that the UK national debt is rising by well over £300 million a day.
We all know how we'll pay that debt back......

I think a key difference between this recession and the last one under Maggie/Major is that instead of the government selling firms off, we have been buying them up (ie banks). Surely this puts us a more promising position? :wonder:

Don't forget that Maggie paid all that doll money in the 1980's, by selling off North Sea Oil. Wouldn't that have been a nice firm to own, especially when oil was hitting $147 a barrell last June? :thumb:

Gordon didn't sell of firms but he sold the countries gold at rock bottom price in a move that cost the country £2 billion.
Would have been nice to have sat on that gold, especially when it went on to reach a record high:thumb:

Goldfinger Brown’s £2 billion blunder in the bullion market - Times Online

Even if the recovery does come before the next general election it won't save Labour from massive defeat

John Major's government had steered the country back to economic growth from the recession but it made no difference, he was still wiped out.

Brown is unelectable, simple as that:thumb:

We need the properly educated elite running this country again, not ex postmen and ships stewards:nono::)

Living standards have increased because incomes have increased significantly, employment increased and because the economy has grown for 12 years.

Borrowing is a result of improved living standards not the cause of it

Experts tell us that we haven't "suffered" as much as Europe so why on earth did Mandleson say over the weekend that joining the Euro is still an objective of this government.
That'll increase the UKIP vote straight away :brickwall:brickwall

I disagree, Bush made if far easier to borrow money in the US by scrapping fiscal rules introduced after the great depression. What happened?
As soon as those rules were scrapped the banks went gun ho on their lending. They knew all along that governments around the world wouldn't let the majority of them go to the wall.
Our governement failed to make sure the FSA was regulating our banks correctly and we suffered the same fate as the US due to the banks lending money to anyone who asked.
It's going to take around 20 years to repay the cost of 12 years of "boom".

If a Lib-Lab government did happen Vince Cable should be made chancellor. He's the only politician who seems to have a real grasp on what has been happening with the econmony of the last year.

I completely agree that the banks lent too much, too easily, but that doesn't make borrowing and debt a bad thing.
My point was that peoples standard of living increased over the past decade irrespective of how much borrowing went on, and tbh you'd expect borrowing to go up in the good times.

Oh look. An article in the WSJ that says it was Brown's fault .... Gordon Brown Helped Cause the Crisis - WSJ.com

"... The facts show otherwise. Britain's economic downturn began when its house price and household debt bubbles inevitably burst, beginning with the run on Northern Rock in September 2007. These bubbles had swollen to higher levels, relative to average price and income levels respectively, than in the U.S. and other major economies.

In relation to their long-term average, British house prices soared by 88.5% between 1997 and 2007, according to the OECD. In the U.S. the rise was 64.5%. Britain's household debt rose to 176.9% of disposable income in 2007 from 104.8% in 1997. During the same period, U.S. household debt rose only to 105.8% of disposable income from 64.3% in 1997. The increases in Germany and France were considerably lower.

Gordon Brown tolerated and even encouraged the formation of these bubbles for several reasons. The traditional sources of Britain's economic strength, the mining and manufacturing industries, shrank during his term as chancellor. Total mining sector output, including oil and natural gas, dropped by 31% between 2000 and 2007. Total manufacturing production was stagnant during this period.

The gross value, in inflation-adjusted prices, of output from all production industries combined fell by 3% between 2000 and 2007. Their employment level dropped by nearly 1.1 million over the same period. These trends were not an inevitable result of shifts in comparative advantages that are said to occur in advanced economies. Real manufacturing output rose at an average annual rate of 2.2% in the U.S., 1.2% in Germany and 1.1% in France between 2000 and 2006, according to the World Bank ..."

etc

Dave

That's the WSJ being the WSJ. Notoriously Conservative/Republican and US Centric.

Can't understand how they can praise an economy which in debt of around £1 trillion, and has been borrowing money as usual only very much more to keep throwing away on useless initiatives which earn us nothing.

Not only do we have to pay that cash back over many years to come, and the interest on it, but we don't appear to have the wherewithal to earn all that money back! Printing money as they are doing is the last resort of complete drongos who have failed drastically in their control and application of the financial affairs of this country for all those years in power.

The coming taxes and inflation are going to be a nasty shock!

Les

Well I guess the upside of high inflation would be that is will dramatically reduce the national debt in real terms

BTW if you want to see truly enourmous government debt just look at the stats for the US, Germany and Japan, they all absolutley dwarf the UK

^ exactly.

And exactly why the WSJ article is absolutely laughable.