Over the course of the last decade, the locusts have eaten out the prosperity of the Thatcher years, squandering the gains built on the painful privatization of the 1980s. This is what happens when the public purse is controlled by economically ignorant leftists who (a) don’t how an economy works and (b) couldn’t care less if they did. From the UK Telegraph:
Britain should not be afraid or ashamed of taking money from the International Monetary Fund, a senior Cabinet minister has told the Daily Telegraph.
Economists have warned that the UK’s public finances are in such a bad state there is a real possibility that Britain will seek help from the fund.
The G20 agreed this week to establish a new scheme, controlled by the IMF, which countries of all backgrounds can go to if they are experiencing financial problems.
That coincided with a concerted push by British ministers to argue that there would no longer be any stigma attached to asking for cash.
The previous Labour Government’s bail-out by the IMF in 1976 was seen as a national humiliation and helped sweep the party from power for 18 years.
A senior Cabinet minister said, however, that the new fund would not be like the 1970s version and should not be seen as such. He said there would be nothing wrong if America or Britain used the facility.
Unfortunately, it will be just like the 1970s, when Labour managed to destroy what was left of the British economy. I was there, I saw it first-hand.
But where is this IMF money coming from? From the printing press, that’s where.
The International Monetary Fund is poised to embark on what analysts have described as “global quantitative easing” by printing billions of dollars worth of a global “super-currency” in an unprecedented new effort to address the economic crisis.
Alistair Darling and senior figures in the US Treasury have been encouraging the Fund to issue hundreds of billions of dollars worth of so-called Special Drawing Rights in the coming months as part of its campaign to prevent the recession from turning into a global depression.
Should the move, which is up for discussion by the summit of G20 finance ministers this weekend, be adopted, it will represent a global equivalent of the Bank of England’s plan to pump extra cash into the UK economy.
However, economists warned that the scheme could cause a major swell of inflation around the world as the newly-created money filters through the system. The idea has been suggested by a number of key figures, including billionaire investor George Soros and US Treasury adviser Ted Truman.
Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the IMF, said: “The principle behind it is that everyone would get bonus dollars and instead of the Federal Reserve having to print them, everyone gets them.
“The objective is to create a windfall of cash. However if everybody goes out and spends the money it could be very inflationary.”
As we’ve discussed in earlier posts, ‘quantitative easing’ is just a fancier word for running the printing press. Only this time we’re going to do it on a global scale. ‘It could be very inflationary’ is perhaps the understatement of the year.
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