Douglas Carswell's Blog

Bailout economics will end in disaster

And so it goes on. 

First the markets fall, with rumours of impending meltdown.  The debts are so vast, we are told, the moment of reckoning is at hand. 

Then amid demands for "action", politicians act generously with other people's money.  They lend it to busted banks or entire countries. Or simply print more of the stuff. 

And the markets soar. For a while ....           

Again and again over the past four years this pattern has been played out. But every time the carousel goes round, the total debt gets bigger. 

Each successive bailout begets another bailout. A banking crisis becomes a sovereign default crisis. In 2008, we rescued individual banks. Today there is talk of a giant bailout of the entire European banking sector. 

With every turn of the carousel, BBC pundits and experts are on hand to tell us why another round of bailouts is needed. They ernestly explain how a financial crisis can be averted by political design, and how 2 + 2 can be made to equal 5. 

Yet never do they seem to explain how lending more solves a debt problem. 

Many of our politico-media elite will turn out to have been as wrong-headed about dealing with this debt crisis as they were about joining the Euro a decade ago.

Eventually, at a terrible price, those of us who have consistently opposed every bailout since 2007 will be proved right. 

The markets will eventually fall. But the money will run out. The music will stop. There will be no more bailout with other people’s money.

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