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Not sure if this is exactly Culture War, but I think if anybody can tell me what the heck is going on, you lot can š
Okay, so the UK has a new monarch, a new Prime Minister and in the past couple of days, a new budget. And now it looks like a new financial crisis.
Can anybody explain to me, in the manner that Chesterton describes Arnold, with "a smile of heart-broken forbearance, as of the teacher in an idiot school, that was enormously insulting" what has caused this kind of meltdown? I'm cribbing from The Guardian, which is trying to explain what is the problem, but my big difficulty is that I don't understand why the Bank of England had to do this. How did the British economy get to the state that the pound is dropping like a metaphor in Amazon's "The Rings of Power" and the currency apparently would have been worthless?
And why is anybody surprised by the tax cuts? They're a Tory government, the first thing they do when they get into power - or when a new PM is hoping to take over - is announce swingeing tax cuts for the better-off (along with swingeing cuts in public spending). So why is everyone now going "Oooh, that's a bit dodgy"? The only surprise for me is that it's Kwasi Kwarteng who is the guy in charge of the Budget instead of Rishi Sunak, but I suppose Rishi - being disappointed in his expectations to succeed Boris - has decided to spend more time with his family('s billions).
I won't talk on why this caused a potential crash (it's to do with the policy causing a rapid change in the price of government bonds, and I don't really interact with bond markets in my day-to-day), but I can talk about the economic side of things.
The Econ 101 stuff here is that essentially in an anemic economic environment, governments are expected to stimulate demand via tax cuts or spending increases. This environment has been very easy on political parties of both sides, because it just requires borrowing more money (less concering in a low interest-rate environment) to fund your program of choice - or tax cut of choice.
For the last fifteen or so years, the paradigm has been 'we need more demand, right-wing governments cut taxes to try and get more, left-wing governments spend more'.
Now we're in the other side of the macroeconomic cycle - low unemployment and high inflation, and the last time we had inflation this high was around 1990. Governments I suspect simply do not have an institutional culture that tells them to cut back on spending, delay or cancel tax cuts, etc, in this situation. It's been too long.
I don't think the currency would've been worthless, but a good example of what this sort of decision-making would look elsewhen would've been a government drastically cutting spending a little ways in to the Global Financial Crisis and the recession that came with it. That sort of decision would've sent shocks into markets not just because it was a bad decision, but also because the bad decision showed an immense lack of judgement.
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