2 Comments

1. daniel says:

   23 February 2010 at 10:38

   hm…..it doesn’t seem that devaluation really helped the british industry…

   http://www.ftd.de/finanzen/maerkte/marktberichte/:das-kapital-die-briten-muessen-es-ja-wissen/50078690.html
   • Marshall Auerback says:

     23 February 2010 at 15:44

     Not really true. If you look at the latest national statistics,
     (_http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/qna1209.pdf_
     (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/qna1209.pdf) )
     you’ll see that the only positive contribution to growth is from net
     exports. Even though I generally subscribe to the view that “exports are a
     cost and imports are a benefit” (on the grounds that it is always desirable to
     have populations consume their own economic output if possible), from a
     national accounts perspective, exports are a contributor to growth. For all
     of the fuss made about the UK’s “fiscal sustainability”, the stats show me
     that government spending is still insufficient to outweigh the total
     collapse in consumption and investment over the past 18 months, so exports are
     the only thing that kept GDP positive is because the decline in imports
     outweighed the decline in exports and given imports are a leakage from the
     expenditure stream. So the import contraction is considered “good” for growth.

     In a message dated 2/23/2010 06:27:48 Mountain Standard Time,
     writes:

     ======