Businessmen will always go on about red tape, planning constraints, labour laws and other irritants, with a ready audience in Conservative governments or coalitions dominated by the Conservative party. Such complaints are not necessarily without foundation. But the big constraint on sales, recruitment and investment is lack of demand, now or in the future. And the deliberate cultivation of an atmosphere of austerity turns out, predictably, to have aggravated the recessionary tendencies that were already apparent.
Keynes talked about the importance of “animal spirits” among the entrepreneurial class. But he also taught that the worst thing a government could do, when capitalist economies demonstrate their propensity to follow a boom with a bust, was to impose further downward pressure.
Developments in both the US and the eurozone do not present a pretty picture. The G20’s action in 2009 to ward off a 1930s-style Depression undoubtedly limited the damage. But the policy challenges facing finance ministers and central bank governors at the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund in September are formidable. And goodness knows what we will face if the Tea Party has its way this week.
- Tea Party economics could get the whole world in a stew, The Observer, July 31, 2011.
2. Five months after he became the last person living in Detroit, Jimmy ‘Sweetpea’ Jameson has finally left the city, leaving it unoccupied for the first time since the Potawatomi Indians temporarily abandoned it in 1623.
【Goodness knows?】相关文章:
最新
2020-09-15
2020-08-28
2020-08-21
2020-08-19
2020-08-14
2020-08-12