Saturday 26 November 2011

RECESSION, IT'S OFFICIAL. AT LAST.

The OECD, a respected economic forecaster, whatever one of those is, and where have they been this past fifteen years, has reported that after Christmas the UK will be in double-dip recession, due to, well, due to everything being shit  and being run by an international kleptocracy.

The OECD has also said that in order to make matters no worse than they inevitably will be due to the Euro and all that nonsense, the UK must develop a Plan B, including a drastic slowing of public sector cutbacks.  The chancellor, below  and his economic team consisting of the foxtrotting, elderly  nitwit Vince  Cable and the former skis monitor in the Cairngorms National Park, Master Danny Alexander, have all said that there is no alternative to what they are doing.  That's what they were elected for. Even though they weren't.

Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr George Osbo, 
prepares his Autumn budget statement.

6 comments:

jgm2 said...

The OECD speaks with forked tongue. I suspect we are fucked either way Mr Ishmael. The die being irretrievably cast as far back as 2004/5. The disaster was set in train back in 2001/2 when the Maximum Imbecile decided to employ one million additional make-weights to hide, at vast expense, in corner offices of councils and hospitals the length and breadth of marginal constituencies. The new miners de-nos-jours.

Which was bad enough as regards massaging the unemployment figures and buying votes but the real economic vandalism was to pay for all this shit with borrowed money instead of raising taxes. Raising taxes would have had the benefit of being honest and living within the UKs means to pay for this additional burden but would also have had the benefit of squeezing household incomes to the point where folk didn't think it a good idea to go out and buy a new car, foreign holiday or a fucking big house with more borrowed money. The pyramid borrowing and faux-wealth 'miracle economy' would never have got off the ground without Brown pump-priming it annually with tens of billions of borrowed money put into the hands of bedwetters, box-tickers and bastards.

It was the double-whammy of creating one million new jobs from borrowed money without creating half a million houses for these newly flush lottery-winners to live in while simultaneously failing to dampen expectations by taxing folk to pay for this additional million that arse-fucked the UK economy.

call me ishmael said...

They're not all bastards, mr jgm2, indeed, many, most are as productive a part of the economy as any number of James Dysons, you know, the gob with the infinitely reshapeable vacuum cleaner. I do agree about taxation, it should be high enough to fund good quality public services - although we would be better off using a different terminology, the public infrastructure, perhaps, as vital to the Ontra-prenewers as it is to all of us, perhaps moreso.

jgm2 said...

Setting aside the argument of how useful or necessary, on average, Brown's 'Miracle Million' are/were I think we can agree that the truly egregious thing to do was to fund their employment with borrowed money.

For the reasons I've mentioned. The big damage wasn't so much hiring these fuckers as doing so on the never-never. Pump-priming the UK economy with 30bn in borrowed cash - plus the PFI bollocks that allowed invisible 'investment' of another 30bn a year but created a time-bomb in ongoing payments. All this short term lunacy for electoral advantage engendering an utterly unsustainable consumer boom and expectation of consumer-boom uber-alles.

We is fucked Mr Ishmael. That cunt Brown should swing for what he's done.

call me ishmael said...

Yes, the PFI thing is impossible to justify and should be hastily rewritten and if the participants don't like it, fuck 'em, let 'em eat some of that we're all in this together shit.

Implicit in everythig you say, though, mr jgm2, is that Brown, for thirteen years, was de facto the domestic prime minister and jugears was a glorified foreign seckatry cum US seckatry of state.
Others - I think most others - have been able to sack their chancellors. What was it with NewLabour. And what was it that generally, throughout the project, saw the Tories praising Brown's prudence, only at the death damning him as an incompetent, raving lunatic. In the letters pages of the broadsheets I was damning him from Day One but the entire MediaMInster establishment sang his praises for the majority of his tenure; surely - as with the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq - it should be a collective hanging, not just a Brown one.

mongoose said...

I am afraid that the Tories too must take their share of the blame. After 18 years - and exhausted and clueless, as any governing party would be - they allowed themselves to be suckered into pretending. They should have said "Yes, we are sorry that we are not some sort of collective Father Christmas but we have just spent almost twenty years showing you all that you reap what you sow, and only that. This will end as Labour governments always do, and always have - every single one there has ever been - this will end in a financial crisis." Instead of saying that they became frightened of being the nasty party. They should do what they do - balance the fucking books and maintain - indeed, conserve - the nation and its interests. They forgot this and let McDoom have a free hand for a decade. A collective hanging indeed. 650 of the fuckers in a neat row would be a start.

jgm2 said...

The big disaster with the Tories was that, up until Cameron got elected party leader, they were pointing out the economic lunacy of it all. I'm pretty sure Hague, Howard et al would get up and give Brown both barrels every budget about his insane borrowing.

But Cameron clearly made the decision to 'detoxify' the brand and match the lunatic Brown's reckless spending policy. Approximately six months before the wheels came off the entire 'miracle' economy. No wonder Brown was looking so smug at the time - managing to sucker the idiots into matching his spending plans even as, behind the scenes, the banks were desperately trying to get Mervyn King to bung 'em a few tens of billions in soft loans.

Which is why the Tories weren't able to go into the election with full-on 'we told you so' kudos but rather were utterly ham-strung by their pledge to match Labour's lunatic spending levels.

All water under the bridge now though. It really doesn't matter who is to blame beyond a bit of righteous vengeance. We are where we are. We are completely fucked.