piddlywiddly
Player Valuation: £500k
You literally cannot be serious?
The 2015 Popularity Contest (aka UK General Election )
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You literally cannot be serious?
piddlywiddly
Player Valuation: £500k
Why Ed Balls is a flawed economist
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by Allister Heath Cityam
21 January 2011 2:07am
LIKE the cat who got hold of the cream, Ed Balls, the new shadow chancellor, could hardly conceal his delight yesterday. But in addition to being the culmination of a colourful tale of personal intrigue, Alan Johnson’s shock resignation will have an electric effect on Westminster. Out goes an amiable, reasonable but incompetent and innumerate shadow chancellor; in comes a combative, ultra-aggressive political heavyweight, a master at twisting statistics and devising economic policies to wage political war. The last residues of New Labour – that centrist, relatively pro-business, pro-wealth creation, version of social democracy – have been swept away. The Brownites now control a Labour party well ahead in the polls; the coalition is about to face a fresh onslaught.
Ed Balls was the architect of Gordon Brown’s economic policies, his eminence grise, wielding massive power at the Treasury and imposing his brand of political economy onto virtually all domestic policy. Balls was as much to blame as his boss for the intellectual errors that crippled Britain’s economy.
In the mid-1990s, Balls, who studied economics at Harvard, invented an entirely new framework to manage the economy and welfare state. He dazzled political journalists with his knowledge and grasp of numbers. He emphasised the need to maintain macroeconomic credibility and to pacify bond markets; it’s a shame he has forgotten these lessons today.
Among Ball’s disastrous errors was his belief – straight out of the 1990s Harvard textbook – that central banks should be turned into agencies exclusively focused on targeting consumer prices, ignoring the money supply, credit and asset prices, and stripped of their traditional job of supervising banks and financial markets. The bubble delivered vast windfalls to the exchequer and house prices boosted consumer spending – but Balls, who thought stability would be maintained and boom and bust abolished thanks to his policies, had completely misunderstood how economies work.
A corollary to this was Ball’s doomed tripartite system of financial regulation. He also created a set of fiscal policy rules that were meant to prevent excessive deficits and state debt – they were paper tigers, with definitions changed whenever the rules were about to be breached. Public spending surged from 1999, as did the regulatory burden. Balls also promoted off-balance sheet public sector accounting of a kind that would have made Lehman Brothers blush, with billions of debt hidden from view.
An army of micro-economists was hired, placed in every government department and tasked with devising elaborate systems of incentives, tax credits, redistribution and ways of micromanaging behaviour. More people were added to the state’s payroll. In some cases, this was by hiking public sector employment; in others, by snaring millions into complex benefits; for many, work no longer paid. The outcome of all of this was to permanently cut Tory support while boosting Labour’s client state. Economics was politics; politics was economics. The way all policies were judged was redefined in Brown’s favour.
Balls learnt all he knows about the relationship between chancellor and Prime Minister from the dysfunctional Blair-Brown duumvirate. That is why Ed Miliband looked so worried last night. Internecine Labour party warfare looms – and British politics is about to become much more fun.
.....don't shoot the messenger, apparently he's very highly rated as an economic guru.
TBH - I feel when elected most of the have their head suck up the middle of it!
The Esk
Player Valuation: £70m
4 year old article written by the Deputy Editor of the Telegraph.
Very objective.
Seanjd
Player Valuation: £30m
But he isn't as guilty. I have criticised Osborne and his party for many things Balls has not been guilty of. You seem absolutely intent on proving that Balls isn't up to the job. He may well not be, but compared to the current Chancellor, his experience thus far (which other posters have elaborated on) would suggest otherwise. You argument here is that we cannot criticise the current Chancellor without criticising a man who has never been Chancellor?
daylightrobber
Player Valuation: £15m
If Balls has learned everything he knows from Gordon Brown then you should probably read this, from This Is Money - A Daily Mail publication no less.
Gordon Brown is bad-mouthed in Britain but he's an economic hero. It's time to listen to him
By WILLIAM KEEGAN
PUBLISHED: 21:57, 2 June 2013 | UPDATED: 17:04, 3 June 2013
Although it is by now widely accepted that Gordon Brown did this country a great service in keeping our economy out of the eurozone, the sad truth is that one of our former prime minister’s other great causes has been sidelined, and as a result both the UK and the eurozone are suffering more economic hardship than is necessary.
I refer to Brown’s championing, at a national and international level, of a Keynesian approach to economic policy.
Domestically, this essentially involves concentrating on balancing the economy, rather than the budget.
Internationally it means regular consultation and co-ordination, so that different economies can conduct economic policy in a way that benefits each and every one of them, and does not involve a ‘beggar my neighbour’ approach.
The great lesson of the interwar years – a lesson which Keynesians hoped would never be forgotten – was that an obsession with balancing the budget can reinforce the natural tendency of a capitalist or market economy to settle at a level well below the full employment of the workforce and of the resources of plant, machinery and the various service sectors which make up a modern economy.
By intervening to boost demand when resources lie idle, governments can balance the budget at a much higher level of output.
For all the bad-mouthing he suffered in this country during his ill-fated premiership, Gordon Brown was considered a hero by Presidents Obama and Sarkozy.
He was the driving force behind the recapitalisation of the Western banking system in 2008.
And, as chairman of the Group of 20 in April 2009, he masterminded the combined ‘stimulus’ – of tax cuts, spending increases and augmentation of the resources of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund – which arrested the dramatic decline in world trade that year.
That was the high point of international economic policy co-ordination in this relatively young century.
After the stimulus was agreed at the London G20 Summit, Brown tried to persuade Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, to build on this by signing up to a global economic growth target.
She refused, and proceeded to be a champion of the programme of austerity which has been impoverishing so many citizens of southern Europe, and whose ramifications are even beginning to drag down Germany’s own economic performance.
Merkel was not the sole culprit. The European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund were all in it together as preachers of austerity.
It is all very well for the ECB President Mario Draghi to promise to do ‘whatever it take’ to preserve the eurozone; but, unfortunately, it is a eurozone whose design is faulty, indeed pre-Keynesian, in the way it demands spending cuts and tax increases of economies that are already on their knees.
By not signing up to the eurozone, the UK has at least been able to adjust its exchange rate to the realities of its uncompetitive trading position. The Greeks, the Italians, the Spanish and even the French cannot do that.
But merely to air the subject of overvalued exchange rates and competitive devaluation – the Chinese, the Japanese, even the Americans seem to be happy to tolerate exchange rate depreciation – suggests there is a woeful lack of demand in the world economy. We cannot all devalue against Mars in order to boost exports and output.
After the Second World War policymakers were mindful of the social and economic horrors that can arise from protectionist pressures, and designed rules for international policy co-ordination which lasted for many decades.
Even after the breakup in the early 1970s of what was known as the Bretton Woods system, the spirit of such co-operation lingered on at the many international meetings attended by financial journalists over the years.
That spirit needs to be revived!
Read more: http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/...d-hes-economic-hero-others.html#ixzz3XNiK3rFl
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
piddlywiddly
Player Valuation: £500k
and therefore the factual content is irrelevant because the content doesn't suit your political agenda?
The Esk
Player Valuation: £70m
If there was any factual content then that would be fine, however it's an opinion piece no more relevent than your or my view of Ed Balls.
piddlywiddly
Player Valuation: £500k
My personal opinion is that Balls is incompetent and dangerous, i haven't hidden this opinion.
This is getting ridiculous. I heavily criticise both Osborne and Balls and yet i'm accused of being pro Osbourne and that no one should be able to criticise him? My god.
piddlywiddly
Player Valuation: £500k
You are of course suggesting that nothing in that article is true? Fair enough, not a debate i can therefore continue in.
peteblue
Welcome back Wayne
Can't argue with that......
piddlywiddly
Player Valuation: £500k
Yes Gordon was an 'economic genius', thats right and therefore Balls is one too;
The Esk
Player Valuation: £70m
No, I am saying it is not an objective piece of journalism. The author has as much a political agenda as I may have, arguably a greater one.
Hence my initial comment about objectivity.
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