So, How’s That Austerity Working Out? UK
The BBC reports: UK economy suffers 0.5% contraction
The UK’s economy suffered a shock contraction of 0.5% in the last three months of 2010, figures have shown.
The severe weather hit activity in the quarter, but the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said even if the weather impact had been excluded, activity would have been “flattish”.
The Chancellor, George Osborne, said the numbers were disappointing.
But he added the government would not be “blown off course” from its austerity programme.
They will soldier on over the cliff to a double-dip recession to prove, once again, that Keynes was right, and conservative supply-side economic policy is a failure. This is really the outline for a Carry On … script. If real people weren’t being hurt by this insanity, it would make a great farce.
2 comments
A bit of light reading…
http://c4ss.org/content/5884
You have to have a national trade policy or genuine free trade. Since I will vote for Obama before we see real free trade, a real trade policy is necessary. Until we return to the days when we actually manufactured goods in the US, and created real wealth, and not just paper wealth, people are screwed.
People who want the gold standard don’t understand that gold has value only because people believe it has value, which is why the value moves up and down so drastically. A potato has more actual value than gold, because you can stay alive if you have nothing but potatoes available, but you can’t live on gold. Gold is no better than paper money, because both require belief to be useful.
Infrastructure has value and should last for an extended period, but most of what is imported from China is cheap junk. When I need to buy stainless fasteners, I take a magnet with me. Real stainless steel isn’t affected by a magnet, but half of the screws and bolts sold as stainless in this country get pulled off the display in the big box hardware stores – it is cheap junk.
As long as the corporations are allowed to make all of the economic decisions, we are really and truly screwed, because they don’t care about anything except their personal welfare. They aren’t smart enough to know they are committing suicide in slow motion, and neither is Obama.