Eddie George Admits Complicity In Brown’s Potemkin Economy
Eddie George, former Bank of England governor, today admitted that he and Gordon hatched a plan a few years ago to deliberately inflate the economy by keeping interest rates artificially low in an attempt to boost consumer spending. In order to sustain demand in the flagging economy after the .com crash of 2000, Gordon and Eddie fiddled inflation figures and cut interest rates, desperate to keep the only remaining glimmer of hope alive - high street spending. The side effects of this have been rampant inflation and an unsustainable boom in house prices, which now it seems can only end in tears for Gordon and the country.
“But we knew that we were having to stimulate consumer spending; we knew we had pushed it up to levels which couldn’t possibly be sustained into the medium and long term.“But for the time being, if we had not done that the UK economy would have gone into recession just as has the United States.
“That pushed up house prices, it increased household debt … my legacy to the MPC if you like has been ’sort that out’.”
He told the Treasury Select Committee - investigating the record of the first decade of the MPC: “We had to take action that on the whole we would prefer not to: stimulating consumer demand because all the other elements of demand had fallen away.
“And we were very conscious of the fact that that could give rise to problems in the future.
“We tried very hard not to do more than we needed to to keep within the inflation target limits but we knew that that was going to cause problems later on which are still with us.”
Gordon and the MPC have left us in a desperate situation of spiralling inflation and massive consumer and business debt. There is only one way this can all end, and it won’t be pretty.
