BBC: Is the economy alive?

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Intriguing blog from the free market Adam Smith institute, which compares the world economy to the natural environment and argues for an economic version of the Gaia theory. We'll see how that goes down with the French unions.

Published on the BBC here

G20: Wrong diagnosis, wrong cures

Monday 30 March

The G20 won't solve the financial crisis because it is blaming the wrong things and coming up with the wrong solutions, a leading financial think-tank says today (Monday 30 March). Writing for the Adam Smith Institute, senior financial analyst Miles Saltiel says that the crisis was not caused by the bonus culture or too little regulation, and is not going to be cured by more regulation or big economic stimulus packages.

Saltiel, of capital analysts Fourth Phoenix and with twenty years' experience in the financial sector, says that the popular 'causes' of the crash – over-complex financial products, bank deregulation, excessive risk-taking driven by large bonuses – don't stand up to scrutiny.

Instead, the blame should fall on inept monetary policy, political social engineering that forced the banks into risky mortgages, regulation that forced mergers and created banks too big to fail, and the failure of the Basel banking rules.

Director of the Adam Smith Institute, Dr Eamonn Butler, said: "Unless the politicians understand what really caused the crisis – and what didn't – they will be applying the wrong cures based on the wrong diagnosis. And that's going to make the world economy even sicker."

Click here to download a PDF of What Went Wrong? An Agenda for the G20
 

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Telegraph Letters: Tom Clougherty

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Debt and the G20

SIR – I was disturbed, albeit not surprised, to read that the average Briton now has to work 83 days a year just to pay off the interest accumulating on their debts (Telegraph.co.uk, March 25).

Once you combine this with the time we spend working to pay our taxes – which the Adam Smith Institute estimates will be around 160 days in 2009 – it could be September before we get to spend any money on ourselves!

Tom Clougherty
Executive Director, Adam Smith Institute
London SW1

Published in The Telegraph here

BBC: G20 demonstrators march in London

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The director of the the Adam Smith Institute, Dr Eamonn Butler, said governments have caused the economic crisis. "The world market economy is actually a very moral system that raised a billion people out of poverty in the last 10 years," he said

Published on the BBC here

CNBC: Tom Clougherty discusses Brown and the G20

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Tom Clougherty discuss the forthcoming G20 summit – and its implications for Gordon Brown – on CNBC's Europe This Week. Published on CNBC here.

Yorkshire Post: Tories must face the taxing realities

Cameron was desperate to show that his party was caring, concerned, and committed to public services. So he and his Treasury spokesman George Osborne refused to talk tax cuts, however much their voters grumbled about it.

But with the threat of a snap election in autumn 2007, Osborne had to say something about tax. So, at the Conservative Conference, he muttered that, just possibly, and on a good day with a fair wind, he might, maybe, just think about potentially ending inheritance tax for anyone who wasn't actually a millionaire.

That produced an immediate surge in Conservative poll ratings that took the leadership completely by surprise. They started to see the wisdom of keeping their core supporters sweet. And yet Ken Clarke's gaffe shows they are still in two minds about tax.

Their problem is the huge hole in the public finances. Conservatives don't like taxes, which they think stifle the work ethic and economic growth. But they don't like governments being in debt either.

And this Government is in debt up to its ears. Taxes have gone up by half (in real terms) since 1997, but public spending has expanded even faster.

Gordon Brown has plugged the gap with borrowing, and then more borrowing – so much, in fact, that the International Monetary Fund has been warning him about it since 2003.

It's profligacy, not prudence, and it's left us in the world's fifth largest public debt hole. The Chancellor, Alastair Darling, says that he owes 41 per cent of GDP – £41 for every £100 we earn. But then he and Gordon Brown have taken on lots of other commitments that he doesn't mention.

I researched the figures for a new book, The Rotten State of Britain. They are truly staggering. There is the cost of all those new schools and hospitals, paid for on tick under the Private Finance Initiative. Guarantees to Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley, plus other massive bank bailouts. A £21bn guarantee on Network Rail's borrowing. A £70bn bill for decommissioning nuclear power stations. Those alone more than double the Government's debt to 89 per cent of our national earnings.

But dwarfing all of these is £1,000bn of pension promises to public-sector workers, and even more for the state pension promised to every retired person.

All in all, I figure that the Government actually owes five times what Alastair Darling claims – a real national debt of £275,000 for every household in Britain.

Getting us out of a debt hole that size won't be easy. The Brown-Darling policy of simply spending and borrowing even more in the hope of staving off the evil day is a bit like trying to cure a hangover by hitting the bottle all over again.

The Conservatives' poll lead makes them pretty sure that, sometime around June next year, they will find themselves saddled with this problem.

The only ways of plugging the borrowing gap are to spend less, or tax more – or both. But they are anxious not to be branded as heartless cost-cutters, and don't want to raise taxes either. Hence their confusion.

My advice would be for them to stick to their principles. They should say firmly that it was big government, big spending, and big borrowing that got us into this mess – and only less of all that will get us out. That Keynesian public works schemes actually cost jobs rather than creating them. That Brown's cheap-money boom was a disaster and that we need sound money that keeps its value. And that if we are to create jobs and rebuild, we need less regulation, not more of it.

Cameron worries that bringing the public budget back under control will mean massive disruption and perhaps unrest, as it did in the early 1980s.

He's right. But then the painful adjustment of the early '80s was followed by a decade of enormous and real prosperity as the economy righted itself. The hangover cure will be unpleasant. But it is the past excesses that make it inevitable.

To order a copy of The Rotten State of Britain by Eamonn Butler from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call free on 0800 0153232 or go online at www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk. Postage and packing is £2.75.

Dr Eamonn Butler is director of the Adam Smith Institute. His new book, The Rotten State of Britain, is published by Gibson Square, price £12.

Published in the Yorkshire Post here.

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The Yorkshire Post (March 25, 2009)

Dr Eamonn Butler

ANOTHER week, another Tory tax pickle.

Last week, David Cameron said that the top rate of income tax might have to go up to 45 per cent. His core supporters were not best pleased – add national insurance, and top earners would be seeing two-thirds of their incomes disappear in tax.

This week, Ken Clarke put his Hush Puppies in it, saying that the Conservatives might abandon their pledge to scrap inheritance tax for most people. That didn't go well with the core voters either. Nor with the millions of middle-class folk who see Gordon Brown grabbing 40 per cent of the family home when mum finally shuffles off.

Tax has troubled the Tories ever since David Cameron became leader. The focus groups told them firmly that the Great British Public simply doesn't believe that you can cut taxes and improve public services at the same time.

[CLICK 'READ MORE' TO CONINUE READING]

World at One: Dr Eamonn Butler discusses inflation

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Click here to listen to Eamonn Butler on Radio 4's World at One discussing inflation (from 5 minutes, 25 seconds to 12 minutes, 58 seconds).

CNBC: Tom Clougherty discusses the G20

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ASI executive director Tom Clougherty discusses the forthcoming G20 summit – and its implications for Gordon Brown – on CNBC's Strictly Money. Published on CNBC here.

CNBC: Tom Clougherty discusses the G20

Click here to watch ASI executive director Tom Clougherty discuss the forthcoming G20 summit, and its implications for Gordon Brown, on CNBC's Strictly Money.

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BBC: Migrants change track to beat recession

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But Dr Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute does not believe xenophobia is the prerogative of the right.

"People on the left might welcome world socialism, but when it comes to people coming from other countries and taking their jobs they are not so keen," he says.

He believes that stopping the movement of workers would be counterproductive and that we actually need people to move between nations.

"A lot of countries send labour abroad and it is good for people in poorer countries to go abroad and send money back home," he says.

"The best sort of world is one in which people are free to migrate over the long term," he maintains.

"What we have at the moment is governments deciding who will be admitted into the country.

"They tend to resist inward migration and eventually, at some point when skills are in short supply, they give in so you get a massive surge."

Massive movements are most difficult to deal with and it is hard to convince people that the lower paid worker is a benefit to the country.

"We have to be very careful about a rise in anti-immigrant animus," he warns.

Published on The BBC here