A Quote by Frances O'Grady
Britain is a textbook case of how growing inequality leads to economic crisis. The years before the crash were marked by a sharp rise in remortgaging and the growth of 0 percent balance transfer credit cards. By 2008 the UK had the highest ratio of household debt to GDP of any major economy.
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Britain is a textbook case of how growing inequality leads to economic crisis. The years before the crash were marked by a sharp rise in remortgaging and the growth of 0% balance transfer credit cards. By 2008 the UK had the highest ratio of household debt to GDP of any major economy.
For any economy, there are two basic factors determining how many jobs are available at any given time. The first is the overall level of activity - with GDP as a rough, if inadequate measure of overall activity - and the second is what share of GDP goes to hiring people into jobs. In terms of our current situation, after the Great Recession hit in full in 2008, US GDP has grown at an anemic average rate of 1.3 percent per year, as opposed to the historic average rate from 1950 until 2007 of 3.3 percent.
When gross public debt exceeds 90 percent of GDP, economic growth tends to decline considerably.
If we had 3 percent growth, which is what we're trying to get to, what we're at, by the way, right now, we're trying to maintain that 3 percent growth. If we had been at 3 percent growth over the last ten years, the budget very nearly would be balanced in 2017. That's how big a difference it makes when you grow the American economy that additional 1 percent over ten years.
A possibility is that we see more and more leverage, and credit-to-GDP ratios rise once more to even higher levels; eventually the banking systems of all advanced economies reach magnitudes of 500 percent, 1000 percent or more of GDP, so that every economy starts to have financial systems that resemble recent cases like Switzerland, Ireland, Iceland, or Cyprus. That might be a very fragile world to live in.
Within a few months in 2008, household finances were crushed as asset values fell, millions of jobs were lost, countless credit cards were canceled, and thousands of homes were foreclosed on.
Rising inequality can create a more highly leveraged economy, and it can then make the economy vulnerable to a crash like 2008.
The massive debt we have racked up to finance our wasteful government is pulling down growth today. Gross debt over 90 percent of GDP weakens growth now. Not tomorrow - now.
If you are moving the informal economy into the formal economy, and if the transactions which for years were never reported as part of GDP are now transacted through banking channels, it will only add to the GDP, not reduce the GDP.
The financial and economic crash of 2008, the worst in over 75 years, is a major geopolitical setback for the United States and Europe.
In 1994, Estonia became the first European country to adopt a flat tax, and its 26 percent flat tax dramatically energized what had been a faltering economy. Before adopting the flat tax, the Estonian economy was literally shrinking. In the eight years after 1994, Estonia experienced real economic growth - averaging 5.2 percent per year.
Barack Obama is a president who, when he had to deal with the 2008 economic crisis, has led the American economy on a completely different path than the one that Europe has chosen eight years later.
he economy favors throughput over quality and craftsmanship, and economists are terrified because the American savings rate has crept upward from about zero to almost five percent. But the mortgage crisis and the burgeoning credit card crisis are causing Americans to become wary of irresponsible debt.
In 1990, about 1 percent of American corporate profits were taken in tax havens like the Cayman Islands. By 2002, it was up to 17 percent, and it'll be up to 20-25 percent very quickly. It's a major problem. Fundamentally, we have a tax system designed for a national, industrial, wage economy, which is what we had in the early 1900s. We now live in a global, asset-based, services world. And we need to have a tax system that follows the economic order or it's going to interfere with economic growth, it's going to reduce people's incomes, and it's going to damage the US.
There was, of course, a global financial crisis. But our Labour predecessors left Britain exceptionally vulnerable and damaged: more personal debt than any other major economy; a dangerously inflated property bubble; and a bloated banking sector behaving as masters, not the servants of the people.
There are many ways to create economic suicide on a national level. The major way through history has been through indebting the economy. Debt always expands to reach a point where it cannot be paid by a large swathe of the economy. This is the point where austerity is imposed and ownership of wealth polarizes between the One Percent and the 99 Percent.
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