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    The Squeeze on British Businesses Is Not Letting Up Soon

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    Company insolvencies hit a three-decade high, with businesses under pressure from high debts, prices and interest rates. The Bank of England held rates steady on Thursday.Britain’s economy faces a bracing fact: The number of companies that folded last year was the highest in three decades.More than 25,000 companies registered as insolvent in 2023, the most since 1993, according to government data published this week. As pandemic-related support measures for businesses ended, the wreckage from years of high debt and interest rates, soaring prices and a cost-of-living crisis become clearer. Insolvencies have spread from small to larger businesses, analysts said.Businesses still dealing with relatively high costs, demands for higher wages, supply chain uncertainties and wavering consumer confidence are hoping for brighter economic times. Slower inflation, stronger growth and cuts to interest rates are expected to come this year, but not soon.On Thursday, the Bank of England held interest rates at 5.25 percent, the highest since 2008, and where they have remained since August, after rising from just above zero in a series of increases over a year and a half.Policymakers said inflation had declined, including wage growth and services inflation, but some measures of persistence remained “elevated.” Two members of the nine-person rate-setting committee voted for a quarter-point rate increase, while one voted for the first time to cut rates.There has been good news on inflation, “but we have to be more confident that inflation will fall all the way back to the 2 percent target and stay there,” Andrew Bailey, the governor of the bank, said on Thursday. “We are not yet at a point where we can lower interest rates.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Lessons From Liz Truss’s Handling of U.K. Inflation

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      The sharp policy U-turn by Liz Truss, Britain’s prime minister, reveals the perils of taking the wrong path in the fight against scalding inflation.Government leaders in the West are struggling with rising inflation, slowing growth, and anxious electorates worried about winter and high energy bills. But Liz Truss, Britain’s prime minister, is the only one who devised an economic plan that unnerved financial markets, drew the ire of global leaders and the public and undermined her political standing.On Friday, battered by savage criticism, she retreated. Ms. Truss fired her top finance official, Kwasi Kwarteng, for creating precisely the package of unfunded tax cuts, billion-dollar spending programs and deregulation that she had asked for.She reinstated a scheduled increase in corporate taxes to 25 percent from 19 percent, a rise she had previously opposed. That announcement came on top of backtracking last week on her proposal to eliminate the top 45 percent income tax on the highest earners. The prime minister, in office a little over five weeks, also promised that spending would grow less rapidly than proposed, although no specifics were offered.The drama is still playing out, and it’s unclear if the Truss government will survive.In the United States, President Biden, while waging his own political battles over gas prices and inflation, has not proposed anything like the kind of policies that Ms. Truss’s government attempted, nor have any other leaders in Europe.Still, for European governments whose economies are suffering greatly from shocks and energy price surges caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine, there are timely lessons from the debacle playing out in London.One of the strongest was delivered early on by the International Monetary Fund: Don’t undermine your own central bankers. The I.M.F., which usually reserves such scoldings for developing nations, on Thursday doubled down on its message. “Don’t prolong the pain,” Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director, admonished.How to blunt the impact of inflation on the most vulnerable without further stoking inflation is the dilemma that every government is confronting.The Bank of England in London has aggressively tried to slow the sharp rise in prices by slowing the British economy.Alberto Pezzali/Associated Press“That is the question of the hour,” said Eswar Prasad, an economist at Cornell University who was attending the annual meetings of the World Bank and I.M.F. in Washington this week.Tension between the fiscal spending policies proposed by a government and the monetary policies controlled by central banks is not unusual. At the moment, though, central bankers are engaged in delicate policy maneuvers in the fight against a level of inflation not seen in decades. With the rate in Britain nearing 10 percent, the Bank of England has moved aggressively to slow down climbing prices through a series of interest rate increases aimed at crimping consumer and business spending.Any expansion of government spending is going to interfere with that aim to some degree, but Ms. Truss’s plan was far too big and too ill defined, Mr. Prasad said.“Measures to help households hit hard by energy increases, by themselves, would not have created that much of a stir,” he said. Many other countries have proposed exactly that. And the European Union has proposed a windfall tax on energy profits to help finance those subsidies.Ms. Truss, instead of coming up with a way to pay for energy assistance, pushed to eliminate a corporate tax increase and cut income taxes for the wealthiest segment of the population. The result was a reduction in government revenue and a ballooning of Britain’s debt.“Overall, the package did not have much clarity in terms of how it would support the economy in the short run without raising inflation,” Mr. Prasad said.By contrast, Claus Vistesen, chief eurozone economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, cited the way governments and central banks worked in tandem when the pandemic struck in 2020 to keep economies from collapsing, issuing vast amounts of public debt.“Central banks printed every single dollar, euro and pound that governments spent” to support households and businesses because of the Covid crisis, Mr. Vistesen said. But now the circumstances have changed, and inflation is setting economies aflame.The actions of the Federal Reserve in the United States illustrate the switch central banks have made: In the harrowing early weeks of the global outbreak of the coronavirus, the Fed embarked on an extraordinary program to stimulate the economy and stabilize markets. This year, the Fed has been swiftly raising interest rates in a bid to slow growth.Both the United States and eurozone countries have somewhat more wiggle room than Britain, because the dollar and the euro are much more widely used around the world as currencies held in reserve than the British pound.Kwasi Kwarteng, Britain’s former chancellor of the Exchequer, left 11 Downing Street after Ms. Truss fired him on Friday.Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated PressEven so, European governments can help households and businesses get through an energy crisis, Mr. Vistesen said, but they can’t embark on an open-ended spending spree.They also need to take account of what is happening in other economies. The richest countries that make up the Group of 7 are essentially part of the same “monetary and fiscal convoy,” said Will Hutton, president of the Academy of Social Sciences. By championing a Thatcher-era blend of steep tax cuts and deregulation, he said, the Truss government strayed too far from the rest of the flotilla and the economic mainstream.The adherence to 1980s-era trickle-down verities also revealed the risks of sticking with outdated policies in the face of changing circumstances, said Diane Coyle, a ​​public policy professor at the University of Cambridge.“The situation in 1979 was very different,” Ms. Coyle said. “There were sclerotic high taxes and an overregulated economy, but not anymore.” Today, taxes in Britain are lower, and the economy is less regulated than the average member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a club of 38 major economies.“The character of the economy has changed,” she said. “Public investment in research and skills are more important.”In that sense, what was missing from Ms. Truss’s economic plan was as important as what was included. And what Britain is lacking, said Mariana Mazzucato, an economist at University College London, is a visionary public investment program like the trillion-dollar climate and digitalization plans adopted by the European Union or the climate and infrastructure program in the United States.A rate of Inflation nearing 10 percent in Britain has affected the price of groceries and how people spend their money.Alex Ingram for The New York Times“If you don’t have a growth plan, an industrial strategy innovation policy,” Ms. Mazzucato said, “then your economy won’t expand.”Both Ms. Mazzucato and Ms. Coyle emphasized that Britain had some specific economic handicaps that predated the Truss administration, including the 2016 vote to exit the European Union, a stubborn lack of productivity, anemic business investment, and lagging research and development.Still, Ms. Coyle offered some advice that referred pointedly to Ms. Truss. “I think the main lesson is: Don’t shoot yourself in the foot.” More

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      Why the British Pound Continues to Sink

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      Britain’s pound coin — rimmed in nickel and brass with an embossed image of Queen Elizabeth II at the center — could always be counted on to be significantly more valuable than the dollar.Such boasting rights effectively came to an end this week when the value of the pound sank to its lowest recorded level: £1 = $1.03 after falling more than 20 percent this year.The nearly one-to-one parity between the currencies sounded the close of a chapter in Britain’s history nearly as much as the metronomic footfalls of the procession that carried the queen’s funeral bier up the pavement to Windsor Castle.“The queen’s death for many people brought to an end a long era of which the soft power in the United Kingdom” was paramount, said Ian Goldin, professor of globalization and development at the University of Oxford. “The pound’s demise to its lowest level is sort of indicative of this broader decline in multiple dimensions.”The immediate cause of the pound’s alarming fall on Monday was the announcement of a spending and tax plan by Britain’s new Conservative government, which promised steep tax cuts that primarily benefited the wealthiest individuals along with expensive measures to help blunt the painful rise in energy prices on consumers and businesses.The sense of crisis ramped up Wednesday when the Bank of England intervened, in a rare move, and warned of “material risk to U.K. financial stability” from the government’s plan. The central bank said it would start buying British government bonds “on whatever scale is necessary” to stem a sell-off in British debt.The Bank of England’s emergency action seemed at odds with its efforts that began months ago to try to slow the nearly 10 percent annual inflation rate, which has lifted the price of essentials like petrol and food to painful levels.Rising Inflation in BritainInflation Slows Slightly: Consumer prices are still rising at about the fastest pace in 40 years, despite a small drop to 9.9 percent in August.Interest Rates: On Sept. 22, the Bank of England raised its key rate by another half a percentage point, to 2.25 percent, as it tries to keep high inflation from becoming embedded in the nation’s economy.Energy Bills to Soar: Gas and electric charges for most British households are set to rise 80 percent this fall, further squeezing consumers and stoking inflation.Investor Worries: The financial markets have been grumbling with unease about Britain’s economic outlook. The government plan to freeze energy bills and cut taxes is not easing concerns.The swooning pound this week has carried an unmistakable political message, amounting to a no-confidence vote by the world’s financial community in the economic strategy proposed by Prime Minister Liz Truss and her chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng.To Mr. Goldin, the pound’s journey indicates a decline in economic and political influence that accelerated when Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016. In many respects, Britain already has the worst performing economy, aside from Russia, of the 38-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.“It’s just a question of time before it falls out of the top 10 economies in the world,” Mr. Goldin said. Britain ranks sixth, having been surpassed by India.Eswar Prasad, an economist at Cornell University, said this latest plunge had delivered a bracing blow to Britain’s standing. A series of “self-inflicted wounds,” including Brexit and the government’s latest spending plan, have accelerated the pound’s slide and further endangered London’s status as a global financial center.Dozens of currencies, including the euro, the Japanese yen and the Chinese renminbi, have slumped in recent weeks. Rising interest rates and a relatively bright economic outlook in the United States combined with turmoil in the global economy have made investments in dollars particularly appealing.But the revival by the Truss government of an extreme version of Thatcher and Reagan-era “trickle-down” economic policies elicited a brutal response.“The problem isn’t that the U.K. budget was inflationary,” wrote Dario Perkins, a managing director at TS Lombard, a research firm, on Twitter. “It’s that it was moronic.”To some, the pound’s journey indicates a decline in Britain’s economic and political influence.Suzie Howell for The New York TimesDuring the more than 1,000 years in which the pound sterling has reigned as Britain’s national currency, it has suffered its share of ups and downs. Its value in the modern era could never match the value of an actual pound of silver, which in the 10th century could buy 15 cows.Over the centuries, British leaders have often gone to extraordinary lengths to protect the pound’s value, viewing its strength as a sign of the country’s economic power and influence. King Henry I issued a decree in 1125 ordering that those who produced substandard currency “lose their right hand and be castrated.”In the 1960s, the Labour government under Harold Wilson so resisted devaluing the pound — then set at a fixed rate of $2.80, high enough to be holding back the British economy — that he ordered cabinet papers discussing the idea to be burned. In 1967, the government finally cut its value by 14 percent to $2.40.Other economic crises thrashed the pound. In the 1970s, when oil prices skyrocketed and Britain’s inflation rate topped 25 percent, the government was compelled to ask the International Monetary Fund for a $3.9 billion loan. In the mid-1980s, when high U.S. interest rates and a Reagan administration spending spree jacked up the dollar’s value, the pound fell to a then record low.The pound’s dominance has been waning since the end of World War II. Today, the global economy is experiencing a particularly tumultuous time as it recovers from the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, supply chain breakdowns, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an energy shortage and soaring inflation.As Richard Portes, an economics professor at London Business School, said, currency exchanges have enormous swings over time. The euro was worth 82 cents in its early days, he recalled, and people referred to it as a “toilet paper” currency. But by 2008, its value had doubled to $1.60.What might cause the pound to revive is not clear.The Truss government’s economic program has forcefully accelerated the pound’s slide — the latest in a series of what many economists consider egregious economic missteps that peaked with Brexit.Much depends on the Truss government.“The plunge in the pound is the result of policy choices, not some historical inevitability” said Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. “Whether this is a new, grim era or just an unfortunate interlude depends on whether they reverse course or are kicked out at the next election.”As it happens, the Bank of England is preparing to issue new pound bank notes and coins featuring King Charles III, at the very moment that the pound has dropped to record lows.“The death of the queen and the fall of the pound do seem jointly to signify decisively the end of an era,” Mr. Prasad of Cornell said. “These two events could be considered markers in a long historical procession in the British economy and the pound sterling becoming far less important than they once were.” More

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      Truss Takes a Bold Economic Gamble. Will It Sink Her Government?

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      Three weeks into her term, Prime Minister Liz Truss’s financial plans have thrown the markets and Britain’s currency into chaos and put her future in peril.LONDON — Prime Minister Liz Truss of Britain campaigned as a tax cutter and champion of supply-side economics, and she won the race to replace her scandal-scarred predecessor, Boris Johnson. Now she has delivered that free-market agenda, and it may sink her government.Four days after Ms. Truss’s tax cuts and deregulatory plans stunned financial markets and threw the British pound into a tailspin, the prime minister’s political future looks increasingly precarious as well.Her Conservative Party is gripped by anxiety, with a new poll showing that the opposition Labour Party has taken a 17 percentage point lead over the Tories. It’s a treacherous place for a prime minister in only her third week on the job.Labour is seizing the moment to present itself as the party of fiscal responsibility. With some experts predicting the pound could tumble to parity with the dollar, economists and political analysts said the uncertainty over Britain’s economic path would continue to hang over the markets and Ms. Truss’s government.“It’s entirely possible she could be replaced before the next election,” said Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, who is an expert on the Conservative Party. “It would be very, very difficult to conduct a full-blown leadership contest again, but I wouldn’t rule anything out.”That Ms. Truss should find herself in this predicament so soon after taking office attests to both the radical nature and awkward timing of her proposals. Cutting taxes at a time of near-double-digit inflation, when central banks in London and elsewhere are raising interest rates, was always going to mark Britain as an economic outlier.But the government compounded the shock last Friday when the chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, unexpectedly announced that the government would also abolish the top income tax rate of 45 percent applied to those earning more than 150,000 pounds, or about $164,000, a year.And Mr. Kwarteng did not submit the package to the scrutiny a government budget normally receives, deepening fears that the tax cuts, without corresponding spending cuts, will blow a hole in Britain’s public finances.Cutting taxes at a time of near-double-digit inflation, when central banks in London and worldwide are raising interest rates, has made Britain an economic outlier.Carl Court/Getty ImagesOn Tuesday, the pound stabilized briefly against the dollar, as did 10-year rates on British government bonds, though both began to gyrate later in the day after a senior official at the Bank of England signaled an aggressive rise in interest rates.The International Monetary Fund, which bailed out Britain in 1976, added to the deepening sense of anxiety when it urged the British government to reconsider the tax cuts. In a statement, it said the cuts would exacerbate inequality and lead to fiscal policy and monetary policy working at “cross purposes.”Rising Inflation in BritainInflation Slows Slightly: Consumer prices are still rising at about the fastest pace in 40 years, despite a small drop to 9.9 percent in August.Interest Rates: On Sept. 22, the Bank of England raised its key rate by another half a percentage point, to 2.25 percent, as it tries to keep high inflation from becoming embedded in the nation’s economy.Energy Bills to Soar: Gas and electric charges for most British households are set to rise 80 percent this fall, further squeezing consumers and stoking inflation.Investor Worries: The financial markets have been grumbling with unease about Britain’s economic outlook. The government plan to freeze energy bills and cut taxes is not easing concerns.Already, the specter of higher interest rates was causing the housing market to seize up. Two major British mortgage lenders announced that they would stop offering new loans because of the market volatility. Higher rates will hurt hundreds of thousands of homeowners who need to refinance fixed-term mortgages — property owners, analysts noted, who are the bedrock of the Conservative Party.“It’s not like the U.S., where people are on 30-year mortgages,” said Jonathan Portes, a professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London.An estimated 63 percent of mortgage holders have either floating rate mortgages or loans that will expire in the next two years. And the steep decline of the pound means that interest rates will have to rise even further than they would have merely to curb inflation.Ms. Truss, he said, could have taken a more cautious approach: rolling out the supply-side measures first, like plans to untangle Britain’s cumbersome residential planning rules and build more housing, which are hurdles to economic growth. Then, when inflationary pressures had eased, the government could have cut taxes.But that was never in the cards, Professor Portes said, because Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng are free-market evangelists who ardently believe that cutting taxes will reignite growth, and because they have little more than two years to turn around the economy before they face voters in a general election.“This is ‘shock and awe,’” he said. “Truss, Kwarteng, and the people around them think they had to act quickly. The longer they wait, the more the resistance will build up.”Kwasi Kwarteng, Britain’s chancellor of the Exchequer, announced tax cuts that some fear will blow a hole in Britain’s public finances.Clodagh Kilcoyne/ReutersDuring the campaign, Ms. Truss modeled herself on Margaret Thatcher, who also announced a series of free-market measures after taking office as prime minister and endured a turbulent couple of years. Unlike Ms. Truss, though, Thatcher worried about curbing inflation and shoring up public finances; she even raised some taxes during a recession in 1981 before reducing them in later years.But Thatcher came in after an election victory over an exhausted Labour government, which gave her more time to weather the downturn and for her deregulatory measures to take effect. She also got a lift after Britain vanquished Argentina in the Falklands War in 1982, which uncorked a surge of patriotism.“Thatcher was thinking in 1979 that I only need to give voters something they like by 1982,” said Charles Moore, a former editor of The Daily Telegraph who wrote a three-volume biography of the former prime minister. “Liz Truss hasn’t got this amount of time.”The better analogy to Ms. Truss, he said, is Ronald Reagan, with his emphasis on tax cuts and other supply-side policies, as well as his relative lack of concern for their effect on public deficits. Like Thatcher, Reagan weathered a recession before the United States began growing again in 1983. And like her, he had a cushion before he had to face voters.Ms. Truss, by contrast, has taken office after 12 years of Conservative-led governments, and three years into Mr. Johnson’s tenure. She will have to call an election by the beginning of 2025, at the latest. The Labour Party, which had been divided by Brexit and internal disputes, has been galvanized by the new government’s chaotic start, in particular Mr. Kwarteng’s plan to cut the top tax rate, which has allowed Labour to stake out a clear contrast on issues of economic equity.Speaking at the party’s annual conference in Liverpool on Tuesday, the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, declared that the Conservatives “say they do not believe in redistribution. But they do — from the poor to the rich.”Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is seizing the moment to present itself as the party of fiscal responsibility.Henry Nicholls/ReutersLabour’s lead of 17 percentage points in a new poll by the market research firm, YouGov, is the largest advantage it has had over the Conservatives in two decades. The Tories won the support of just 28 percent of those surveyed, raising questions about its ability to hold on to its existing seats, according to Professor Bale.That forbidding political landscape only adds to the challenge facing Ms. Truss. For the tax cuts to have one of their desired effects — which is to encourage businesses to invest more — economists said companies would need some reassurance that the policy is not going to be reversed by a new government in two years.“This is a very inexperienced government swinging for the fences in a situation where Labour is the strong favorite in the next election, if they don’t swing too far left,” said Kenneth S. Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard. “If one believes that the tax cuts are going to be reversed under Labour, and that there is a high chance of a Labour government, why would they influence long-term investment?”Britain, Professor Rogoff said, was also rowing against much greater forces in the global economy. After years of low inflation and extremely low interest rates, the flood of public spending because of the coronavirus pandemic has brought back the scourge of inflation and a shift toward higher rates.“The verdict will almost certainly be that governments borrowed too much and should have raised taxes on the wealthy more,” he said.In the short term, Ms. Truss is likely to find herself increasingly at odds with the Bank of England. The bank was already expected to raise rates at its next meeting in November. On Tuesday, its chief economist, Huw Pill, said the government’s new fiscal policies would require a “significant monetary policy response.”Adam S. Posen, an American economist who once served on the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, said, “The government’s policies are not only outrageously irresponsible, but they don’t seem to understand that the bank has to respond to these policies by raising interest rates a lot.”The Bank of England, like many other banks worldwide, is expected to raise rates at its meeting next month.Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Posen, who is the president of the Peterson Institute of International Economics, likened Britain’s loss of credibility in the markets to that of Britain and other European countries in the 1970s and Latin American countries in the 1980s. The best course, he said, would be for the government to reverse its fiscal policy, though he said Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng seemed “willfully committed to it.”Certainly, they have given no indication that they plan to back down. On Tuesday, Mr. Kwarteng told bankers and asset managers that he was confident the government’s plan would work.After the turmoil that led to Mr. Johnson’s ouster in July, and the protracted contest to replace him, few in the Conservative Party have the stomach to move against Ms. Truss now. But analysts note that the new prime minister has a shallow reservoir of support among lawmakers. Barely a third of them voted for her in the final ballot against her primary opponent, Rishi Sunak, and she won the subsequent vote among party members by a closer margin than expected.Taking note of the new YouGov poll, Huw Merriman, a Conservative lawmaker, may have spoken for many of his colleagues when he said on Twitter, “Those of us who backed Rishi Sunak lost the contest, but this poll suggests that the victor is losing our voters with policies we warned against.”“For the good of our country, and the livelihoods of everyone in our country,” he added, “I still hope to be proven wrong.” More

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      Fed raises interest rate by 0.75 percentage points as US seeks to rein in inflation

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      Fed raises interest rate by 0.75 percentage points as US seeks to rein in inflationThird outsized rate increase in a row as central bank struggles to fight runaway inflation, increasing the cost of everything The Federal Reserve announced another sharp hike in interest rates on Wednesday as the central bank struggles to rein in runaway inflation.The Fed raised its benchmark interest rate by 0.75 percentage points, the third such outsized rate increase in a row, bringing the Fed rate to 3%-3.25% and increasing the cost of everything from credit card debt and mortgages to company financing.The central bank signaled more raises to come, predicting rates would reach 4.4% by the end of the year and not start coming down until 2024. The Fed expects the rate rises to hit the job market – raising unemployment from 3.7% to 4.4% next year – housing prices and to lower economic growth.“We have got to get inflation behind us. I wish there were a painless way to do that. There isn’t,” the Fed chair, Jerome Powell, said. “We have always understood that restoring price stability while achieving a relatively modest increase in unemployment and a soft landing would be very challenging. And we don’t know. No one knows whether this process will lead to a recession or if so, how significant that recession would be.”Central bankers around the world are raising rates sharply as they too attempt to tackle the cost of living crisis. This week the Bank of England is expected to announce its largest rate rise in 25 years. The European Central Bank raised interest rates across the eurozone by a record margin earlier this month.The Fed initially dismissed rising inflation, arguing it was a “transitory” phase triggered by the pandemic and supply chain issues. But as prices escalated the Fed announced a series of aggressive moves in the hopes of bringing prices back under control.Until recently Powell had said he hoped that the economy could achieve what he called a “soft landing” – a slowdown that would bring costs down but not lead to a spike in unemployment and a recession.Speaking at a congressional hearing on Wednesday, some of the US’s top bankers said it was too early to tell how rate rises would impact the economy. “I think there’s a chance, not a big change, a small chance, of a soft landing,” said Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase.“There’s a chance of a mild recession, a chance of a hard recession. And because of the war in Ukraine and the uncertainty in global energy and food supply, there’s a chance that it could be worse. I think policymakers should be prepared for the worst, so we take the right actions if and when that happens,” he said.Raising rates makes borrowing more expensive which should reduce spending and lower prices. But the policy is a blunt instrument and rate rises take time to filter through to the wider economy. So far the Fed’s rate rises have not had a significant impact.The US jobs market remains robust, with unemployment still close to a 50-year low, consumer spending rose last month and inflation remained stubbornly high in August, 8.3% higher than a year ago.There are, however, some signs of a slowdown. Existing home sales fell in August for the seventh consecutive month, according to the National Association of Realtors. Sales were 19.9% lower than in August 2021 and are now at their lowest level since they briefly stalled during the height of the pandemic in 2020. And large employers including BestBuy, Ford and Walmart have announced layoffs or hiring freezes.TopicsFederal ReserveUS economyBank of EnglandInflationEconomicsEuropean Central BankUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on Covid relief: ideologies matter in democracies | Editorial

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      When Covid struck, it was governments that decided people could not go to work and governments that took people’s money away. It is now down to governments to decide whether or not to return that money and when to open up the economy. In the US, Democrats want to give generously. While $1.9tn dollars is a lot of money – about the size of Canada’s GDP – it probably is not enough.As Randall Wray of the Levy Institute has pointed out, the US government is engaged in relief, not stimulus, spending. It is offering much-needed assistance to the devastated balance sheets of households, school districts and local governments. Rescuing public services, making sure people don’t starve and building Covid-testing systems is not an economic stimulus but a necessary antidepressant. Reducing the size of the relief package would prolong the recession, which, given the virus’s capacity to surprise, may last longer than the experts predict. President Joe Biden was right to rebuff criticism that Democrats risked overheating the economy, saying the problem was spending too little, not too much. There is slack in the US economy: 400,000 Americans left the labour market in January.Mr Biden aims to control the virus and then create jobs with infrastructure investments to reinvent the post-crisis economy for a zero-carbon world. Call it a spend-then-tax policy. If he succeeds, Mr Biden will go some way to repudiate the conventional economic wisdom that argues that if governments keep borrowing too much, they risk defaulting, will end up printing money and be forced in a panic to put up interest rates. The pandemic revealed this to be bunk. Central banks can keep interest rates low by buying government bonds with money created from thin air. Last year, they bought 75% of all public debt.Within days of assuming power, Mr Biden had a plan, and new thinking, to rebuild a Covid-scarred country. Boris Johnson has little to show after months. His government intends to cut universal credit, raise council tax bills and freeze public-sector pay, weakening household finances. Given this mindset, which has dominated policy since 2010, it is hardly surprising that the £900bn of Bank of England “quantitative easing” money sitting with banks can’t find profits in the real economy. The Bank has “knowledge gaps” about QE. Yet there is truth in the quote attributed to Keynes that “you can’t push on a string” – when demand is weak, monetary policy can do little about it.With interest rates low, no recovery to invest in and no new regulations, UK banks will turn inwards, not outwards. Instead of the City contributing to the productive economy and a just green transition, expect speculation and Ponzi-like balance sheets. It is lobbying to expand lucrative but socially useless activities. In January, Tory peers with City interests argued for a new finance regulator with a “competitiveness” objective – a Trojan horse for deregulation.Central banks are creatures of their legislatures, but have been permitted, for ideological reasons, to work without a social contract. In her recent paper, Revolution Without Revolutionaries, the economist Daniela Gabor warned that unelected technocrats must not be allowed to hand politicians reasons to adopt external constraints that can be blamed for unpopular policies. It is timely advice. The UK will have record peacetime levels of debt. Rishi Sunak says such borrowing is “unsustainable”. Yet UK gilts are a risk-free financial asset, which is why banks crave them.The inequality, financial instability and ecological crises have multiple causes, but their existence is built on radical, free-market economics. It is not the case that the government’s ability to spend is temporary while interest rates remain low, as Mr Sunak claimed. Bond-purchasing programmes can control yields. A system that benefits private finance but subordinates the state and threatens to expose it, post-pandemic, to austerity and elevated levels of unemployment must be resisted. Only those unable or unwilling to believe the evidence of their own eyes would say otherwise. More