Douglas Carswell's Blog

Bailout-and-borrow economics is busted

"It is hard to believe that three years after the banking crisis of 2008 we are back to the brink of recession", writes Alistair Darling in the Evening Standard.

What I find hard to believe is that Mr Darling should have believed anything else given our response to the crisis. Along with so many "experts", he seems to have thought we could borrow our way back to prosperity.

Almost everything that has been done since 2008 has been wrong; We've turned a banking crisis into a sovereign default crisis. Thrown good money after the bad. Rewarded failure and reinforced financial recklessness.

Those billion pound bailouts have served to delay the moment of reckoning, while increasing the size of the debts and drawing ever more blameless folk into the catastrophe. It's been another shot of vodka to put off the mother of financial hangovers.

As Western leaders meet together to dig an ever deeper hole, I find it extraordinary that they seem quite incapable of changing tack - or even acknowledging that their bailout-and-borrow approach doesn't work.

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