Stephanie Flanders
speaker
68 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2012
last heard Dec 2013
Stephanie Flanders’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, this is one of those exchanges that I hear often and it pains me every time I hear it because I'm afraid to say both the interviewer and the interviewee have made that classic mistake that everyone makes, some of the best politicians, some of the best journalists make, which is the difference between the deficit and the debt.
If we think about it very carefully, maybe we'll remember it finally.
The debt is the accumulated amount of debt, borrowings that you've had in your lifetime.
So it may be the size of your mortgage, for example, is your debt.
That's how much you owe.
And then there's the borrowing you do on a day-to-day or a week-to-week or a year-to-year basis.
That's the deficit.
So how much the government has borrowed this year to meet the gap between its spending and
and its tax revenues is the deficit.
And at the end of the year, in effect, that amount has been added to its stock of debt, which is always, almost always, a much, much bigger number.
And there is no country that's cutting its debt at the moment.
If you look at the figures, there's no US, Britain, Germany even.
They're not on course to lower their debt as a share of their economy for years.
If you look at the structural deficit, which is an estimate of what the deficit would look like once the economy is recovered, so you're getting away from all the sort of short-term impact of a recession where you have higher unemployment benefits and your tax revenues have gone down, and just say, what's the long-term hole in the budget?
that you've got to fill.
Well, they're maybe not something that Baroness Varsity wants to know.
The British have made more of an effort to cut their borrowing than America has.
America's not got very far at all, but America overall has been able to borrow less because it's been growing faster.
Well, the Eurozone is another interesting story.
We think of the Eurozone as having put itself in a sort of fiscal straitjacket, that it's been hurting its growth by cutting its deficits, cutting the deficits as far and fast as they have.
Showing 21–40 of 68 · page 2 of 4
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