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
In fact, its overall borrowing and its structural borrowing, it's more or less the same story.
They've more or less halved what they had in 2009.
What that tells you is that they have been trying even harder than we have to cut their structural borrowing, and it wasn't that big to begin with.
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 overall deficit for the US, and that includes not just the federal deficit, but also everything that the states are doing, it's fallen from 13% of GDP in 2009 to 8.1% this year.
That's what the International Monetary Fund is forecasting.
So that's a fall of nearly 5% of GDP, whereas if you look at the UK, our deficit hasn't
fallen nearly as far.
Showing 41–60 of 68 · page 3 of 4
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