Thank You, America

This is probably never going to gain traction, but I wonder whether we should really be thanking the US for triggering the financial crisis...

My reason for saying this is that, at least by doing so, they called a halt to the process of adding to the ever-growing pile of debt, both good and bad, before it became even more unsustainable.  If the whole edifice had been able to carry on throughout 2008, 9 and 10, just think how much more of a mess it would have been to clear up then.  At least by triggering it now, we have a smaller problem, even though the sheer scale of what we are dealing with now makes the mind boggle.

Of course, the US played its part in bringing this all about, and they should rightly take their share of the blame for that.  However, although HMG likes to blame it all on the US, the Americans didn't lend money to uncreditworthy people in the UK, or encourage people to use their houses like glorified ATMs.  Neither did they promote the view that the good times would go on for ever, as HMG did with their promises of endless bounty (i.e. end of the bust) and thus encourage people in the belief that they could go on borrowing more and more to fuel a lifestyle that was in reality beyond their earning capacity.  They didn't even create a regulatory regime that enabled our banks to take on liabilities that are 3-4 times the size of our annual economic output, much of which was 'invested' in instruments, the contents of which were of dubious provenance, to say the least.  WE did that...

I know this will never be fashionable, but I for one am about as relieved as you can sensibly be at this point that someone called time on it all.  I only wish that we had collectively had the sense to see that the age of debt would never work, and made sure we didn't bring it on in the first instance.

What we need now is a set of sensible policies to get us out of it, and a series of actions that spring from a collective sense of responsibility.  To do that requires a) a proper assessment of the real problems and b) a sharing of the pain.  I don't see either at this point, unfortunately.