Britain is slowly going bust

FrankWilhoit 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Britain has been bust since the Napoleonic Wars. They managed to effectively conceal it for a century by selling carefully-structured debt (the "consols"). That worked until World War I; since when, they have been ineffectively concealing their national bankruptcy, less effectively with each successive setback -- WW2, the Cold War, Brexit.

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bookofjoe 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://archive.ph/TKIsq

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DaveZale 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Did we all get spoiled by effectively negative interest rates for a number of years in the 2010s?

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mytailorisrich 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Growth has stalled since the 2008 financial crisise and debt has skyrocketted both because of the financial crisis and Covid.

Previous governments have not been good at handling this but the current Labour government is especially bad because politically and ideologically they are held by interests that want to increase public spending and "just make the rich pay", which only makes public finances worse and dampen growth further.

	▲	PaulHoule 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My understanding is that they would like to do that but they won't or can't. Jeremy Corbyn would have liked to have soaked the rich but Keir Starmer isn't that type. If Labour raised taxes it could help with the fiscal situation, at least in the short term, although some are going to argue that it would hurt growth in the long term or drive away millionaires although it seems oligarchs from all over the world want Nth homes in London no matter what the cost. The Economist liked the conservatives back in the Thatcher days but has no love for them as they seemed about as rudderless as Starmer does. It's often though that fiscal problems and the resulting austerity drives the growth of the far right but so far it seems when the far right gets some power in Europe it behaves the same as other parties for the same reasons.