Recession rebrand (From Oxford Mail)

Of course unpleasant as it may be, a recession is in fact only the natural and necessary clearing out of malinvestments made during a preceding a boom, and there can be little doubt that the boom that really caused this crash was started quite deliberately and for political reasons, by the current Prime Minister while he was at the Treasury in 2000/01.

In an attempt to prevent the natural cycle then that should have properly cleared out the bad investments of the "dot com bubble", because it would not have looked terribly good if a party that had only really been able to achieve power in 1997 by persuading the City and country that it could be trusted with the economy presided over a recession in its first term and leading up to a second General Election, the Monetary Policy Committee was put under pressure from the Treasury to maintain interest rates far below their natural level - both here and in the US.

This of course has always been a signal to the money men that they should be lending more, creating more credit, "inflating" the quantity of purchasing power in the whople system. With nowhere particular to go, as many consumer goods were actually falling in price as China pumped out as much as anyone could want, it went into speculative land values, pricing many ordinary families out of the property market whilst making others paper fortunes.

As sure as night follows day, recession follows boom (whatever the doubly disingenuous Gordon Brown might say about having "abolished boom and bust"), and the boom in this was created by Gordon Brown to save Labour's electoral skin.

Don't take my word for it of course - the late Eddie George told the Treasury Select Committee all this in February 2007 and it was promptly ignored. So much for scrutiny and accountability.