Larry Elliott has a pretty good explanation as to why the world's economies look like they are falling over today. He has said:
The crisis of 2007-09 was a lesson to policymakers that international policy cooperation was needed to increase global demand. It was a lesson that there needed to be higher investment in infrastructure and skills to raise productivity. It was a lesson that an economic model based on widening inequality was unviable. It was a lesson about the risks of uncontrolled capital flows.
Clearly the lesson wasn't big enough.
Good, but not quite good enough.
I would add three things.
Politicians did not realise that sustainability had to be built in.
Second, they did not realise that growth was not the real goal per se: meeting people's needs, including that for high quality employment was.
And third, it was not understood that only courageous politicians willing to challenge markets heading us in the wrong direction can achieve the goals that we must have now.
Bring on Corbynomics, I say.
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Didn’t the Chinese pump a lot of money into infrastructure projects, and didn’t their politicians very recently make courageous challenges to the markets when it all started going wrong?
You think mass marketisation is what I am proposing?
There is a profound difference between blindly precipitating yourself over a cliff-edge carrying a bucket of renmimbi and carefully climbing a ladder with a fire-hose.
Matters are at their best when wisdom has a greater influence on power than wealth does; the converse is also true.
That’s quite neat Franklin, very quotable (& true).