ZoomClouds: John Redwood MP for Wokingham

... k-end. It is time to re-examine the views of this blog, and the responses from many of you. I have argued: 1. The US and the UK will avoid recession but will experience a slow down, sharp in some areas and sectors. Some are trying to talk us into recession, by claiming the US is already i...

This year I have read many times commentators and market experts tell me the USA is œalready in recession. They should take a look at the first quarter figures, which shows the US economy still grew at 0.6%, thanks to improvement in exports following the devaluation of the dollar, some i...

... t. The Prime Minister™s line at the recent G8 summit was to blame someone else and pretend he could nothing. He told us the slow down or recession was made overseas, refusing to see the policy errors made here at home that have given us first an inflation and now a slow down. He told us...

... e very chirpy about the outlook only a month ago, are suddenly full of fear, reporting falling orders. The BCC itself has become the latest to signal recession. There were Wall Street analysts telling us the US was in recession at the beginning of the year. Instead, so far we have just had a s...

... sirable public spending. Sell some public sector assets to raise cash. The government should do all three if it is serious about preventing recession or recovering from the downturn. Money is too tight and interest rates too high, just as money was far too loose and interest r...

... Committee of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article™s conclusions. All this is looking very dated, as the world faces recession, credit crunch and downturn. In these circumstances there should be more opportunity to concentrate on practical greenery. Most could surely...

... help relieve the immediate inflationary pressures, and might persuade eventually even the slow moving Monetary Policy Committee that it should fight recession rather than inflation. The long term trend in oil and other commodity prices is up, but that does not mean it will happen in straight line w...

... ied for bad news. Over the last year we have heard a great deal from the Uk government and from the supine parts of the media about a US recession, and how the world problems emanate from across the Atlantic. We often have to hear lectures about the importance of the EU to our economy, ...

Readers of this site will know I have long been advocating that the Bank of England cuts interest rates and concentrates on fighting recession. Inflation will fall next year anyway. This has proved contentious with some of my readers. I ask them, how much more evidence do you need of slow...

... now know the Chancellor thinks the optimistic forecasts from HMT about growth prospects this year and next are a bunch of lies, but his forecast of a recession remains unquantified. If we take him seriously he is saying the Treasury have now to revise their forecast down to show big drop in GDP 2008...

... ing the targets they had been set. 2. The Bank of England and the ECB are getting the downturn wrong, keeping interest rates far too high and making recession more likely. The Fed has done better into the downswing. 3. The UK government was wrong to change its inflation target as the boom was buil...

Presumably the PM wants to bind Mandelson and the Blairites into his voyage into recession for some industries. Does Mandelson want to help, or is he out to assist the Blairite cause from his new ringside seat? Let’s assume he wants to help, as he tells us. Brown has given him the...

... ered or done the wrong things, the impact of the financial crisis on the rest of the economy will be worse. The two crises now merge. The recession that is beginning to hit shops and garages, restaurants and factories, will cut the money coming into businesses. They will need to borrow m...

... d. The market immediately rallied and is now up on the day. Subsequently markets decided the interest rate cuts are not sufficient to stop a recession and fell again. I don’t know where that leaves the independence of the MPC, but it was the first downpayment on the action we...

... shares in Australia, Japan and other Asian centres, following the collapse of US share prices yesterday. The world™s investors are gripped by fear of recession, and are rushing into cash to protect what remains of their savings. Listening to stockbrokers this week, they have said that the...

My theme for many weeks has been simple - the authorities should fight deflation, not inflation. recession is the new enemy, just as inflaiton and excess credit was the enemy two years ago. Every word and aciton of government and regulators should be examined with this in view. So how are they doin...

Some analysts and commentators think there are two different problems, the banking crisis and the threat of recession. Now large sums of public money have been offered throughout the western world to increase bank capital they imply that the first crisis is on the mend, and maybe sometime we ...

... no alternative. The last time that happened in the UK we were lumbered with the Exchange Rate Mechanism which gave us a rapid inflation followed by a recession. Recently in the USA the Republican and Democrat leadership united with both Presidential candidiates behind the Paulson plan. That pl...

... e private sector. If this has to be more than matched by more borrowing by the public sector to keep the banking system going and to pay the costs of recession, it is difficult to see what we have gained. ill lend even less money to people and companies to buy things. Businesses will then sell few...

(WRITTEN FOR GUARDIAN COMMENT) I am asked if we can spend our way out of a recession? I write against a silly political background, where the left are trying to annex Keynes again, as if he were a left wing figure whose views had been buried by Conservative monetarists and deregulator...

I am asked if we can spend our way out of a recession? I write against a silly political background, where the left are trying to annex Keynes again, as if he were a left wing figure whose views had been buried by Conservative monetarists and deregulators. The truth is very differen...

The government wants to increase spending, and therefore borrowing, to help us out of recession. We need to distinguish between the several different ways in which borrowing will rise in the next few months. Some are inevitable and some are avoidable. ...

... this one wants history to repeat itself. Today we are to be told that the government needs to spend and borrow more to help us out of recession. It is curious, when we are also told that we are in the current mess because we have borrowed too much. This crisis came about because the ...

Today economists have written to the Sunday Telegraph warning against an over borrowed government trying to spend our way out of recession. They are right to be concerned about the rapid build up of debt in the public sector, and the careless attitude towards more debt by the author...

... stead of merely shifting it to China or India. However, they have now come up with a policy which is going to transform all that. It is called recession. It will cut our carbon output. The trouble is, it is going to cut a lot more as well, leading to a big increase in unemployment and a furth...

Readers will know I have wanted cuts in interest rates to stave off recession for many months. I have gone hoarse telling the MPC they have got it wrong again, lurching from too easy to too tight. This week, instead of having their normal MPC meeting wasting time reaching the obvious conclusion...

... and from the co-ordinated government responses, we still have largely frozen money markets and a credit seizure on our hands. Meanwhile the views of recession are worsening, with most forecasters rushing to catch up with reality and now estimating a longer and deeper downturn. On both sid...

... was a once and for all loss to be admitted and paid for, whereas the worrying dynamic of this crisis is the further deterioration of the loans as the recession deepens and more become unable to pay. The plan failed to see just what huge sums were needed by the banks relative to tax revenue. It faile...

Last night we were treated to a long piece from the UK, Shanghai and New York to tell us the recession was global and originated in the USA - which just happens to be the government’s line. We were shown the example of a waste paper business in the UK that could no longer sell at go...

... appening? He would ask himself how easy it is going to be to borrow all the money he needs to borrow to buy the bank shares and pay for the expensive recession we are entering. If his fellow guests at the Summit were unkind, they would ask him who he thinks is going to lend the UK the extra money he...

... I heard Ian Pearson speak last night. He like many Labour Ministers read out a script which told us he felt our pain. He told us we were going into recession. He then told us that the 3 point Brown plan was the answer to our banking woes. If only! Appartently they have three aims from their inte...

... tate has to borrow more on behalf of taxpayers to carry on with its high spending “ is the only type of tax cut which makes sense as they try to stop recession turning into depression. This, like all government soundbites, needs examining. A tax cut œpaid for œ by borrowing does not necessarily r...

... he revenue loss next year, 2009-10, will be a stunning £72.7 billion. £8.6 billion of that is the policy change on VAT. The rest is the impact of the recession on Stamp Duty, NIC, Income Tax, Corporation Tax and the rest. The borrowing this year was said by the Chancellor to have almost dou...

... ng so. Instead, they are left defending an ill judged tax proposal which most of the public is cynical about, which will not suddenly lift us out of recession. People do not welcome a tax cut which they have to pay for with huge tax rises after the election. Meanwhile they have spurned more modest ...

... as the Paulson plan morphs for the fourth time. Governments are making it quite clear they will use every weapon in their armoury to try to lift the recession. We should expect more interest rate cuts, more financial support for banks and more adjustments of general economic policy. The...

... This government will drown in a sea of red ink. Never have I seen the public accounts in such dire straights. The government assumes a mild and short recession, with recovery beginning in the middle of next year. Even so, they anticipate tax revenues plunging by a massive £73 billion in 2009-10 beca...

... Policy Committee is acting out of fear, folllowing several years of getting it comprehensively wrong. They failed to see either the inflation or the recession they triggered. Now they are likely to misread the government debt problem. Huge amounts of liquidity are being built up. In the ...

... t™s latest wheeze of a so called independent Monetary Policy Committee turns out to be as ill judged as the ERM. The ERM led to inflation first, then recession, by forcing the country to take interest rates which were too low, followed by rates that were too high. The so called independent Monetary ...

... r rates of interest to ward off mass redundancies and bankruptcies. The Monetary Policy Committee decided to keep rates high, leading unavoidably to recession. Now we are getting the bankruptcies and job losses that were the inevitable consequence of their decision, they strangely p...

... ugh. John also expressed disappointment that the Prime Minister had engaged in party political point-scoring over his suggestions on how to beat the recession. The full text of John™s contributions, taken from Hansard, now follows: Mr. John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): Will the Prime Minister r...

... economy itself will enter a period of no growth followed by relatively slow growth. I called for lower interest rates a year ago to try to stave off recession, but the loow moving authorities failed to see the problem in time. Now we are all going to suffer as a result. All this see...

... had to reveal at last just how big a deterioration there has been in our economic prospects and the public account. They now accept we are going into recession. They see that we are going to face a winter of job losses and bankruptcies. Woolworths and MFI have led the way in recent days. There are a...

... r for western governments. Now they have stumbled into a policy which will cut carbon emissions sharply, their policy of falling living standards and recession, they are all rightly trying to run away from it. So are their voters, who might tell pollsters they want to live in a lower carbon world, b...