{"id":63115,"date":"2022-07-22T07:14:05","date_gmt":"2022-07-22T12:14:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=63115"},"modified":"2022-07-22T07:14:05","modified_gmt":"2022-07-22T12:14:05","slug":"234-britain-on-the-brink","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=63115","title":{"rendered":"#234. Britain on the\u00a0brink"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com\/2022\/07\/02\/234-britain-on-the-brink\/\">#234. Britain on the\u00a0brink<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p><strong>THE PRICE OF EXTREMISM<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Whether the country\u2019s leaders know it or not, the United Kingdom is now at serious risk of economic collapse.<\/p>\n<p>We must hope that this doesn\u2019t happen. If it does, it will take the form of a sharp fall in the value of Sterling which, in these circumstances, is the indicator to watch.<\/p>\n<p>A currency crash would cause sharp increases, not just in the prices of essential imports such as energy and food, but also in the cost of servicing debt. In defence of its currency, Britain could be forced into rate rises which would bring down its dangerously over-inflated property market.<\/p>\n<p>This risk itself isn\u2019t new. Rather, it results from a long period of folly, and can\u2019t be blamed entirely on the current administration, inept though the Johnson government undoubtedly is. What we\u2019re witnessing now seems to be a government on the edge of panic. The official opposition doesn\u2019t offer a workable alternative programme, and mightn\u2019t be electable if it did.<\/p>\n<p>We need to be clear that\u00a0<strong>the root cause of Britain\u2019s problems is long-term adherence to an increasingly extreme ideology sometimes labelled \u2018liberal\u2019<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s one thing to recognize the merits of the market economy, but quite another to turn this into a fanaticism which judges everything on its capability of generating short-term private profit.<\/p>\n<p>Extremism is divisive, and creates winners and losers to an extent that moderation does not. If solutions still exist for Britain\u2019s worsening problems \u2013 and that\u2019s a very big \u201cif\u201d \u2013 there are two reasons why such solutions mightn\u2019t be adopted.<\/p>\n<p>The first is that these solutions would anger a very vocal group of winners under the existing system.<\/p>\n<p>The second is that those in charge would have to make a public admission of the failures of extremism.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>#234. Britain on the\u00a0brink THE PRICE OF EXTREMISM Whether the country\u2019s leaders know it or not, the United Kingdom is now at serious risk of economic collapse. We must hope that this doesn\u2019t happen. If it does, it will take the form of a sharp fall in the value of Sterling which, in these circumstances, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[93,175,7783,195,538,31315],"class_list":["post-63115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-britain","tag-credit","tag-credit-expansion","tag-debt","tag-money-printing","tag-surplus-energy-economics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=63115"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63115\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63116,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63115\/revisions\/63116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}