Malcolm Blair Robinson

Post Brexit 2: Money

August 2, 2016 By Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Because no work on an action plan was done by either side before the referendum and because so much of our national daily life is interwoven with the EU, there is no clear way forward now that the country has voted to draw stumps and go. There are what one might call foraging expeditions going on with various secretaries of state visiting potential trading partners overseas, but even they do not speak with one voice, as a new Cabinet Committee meets to discuss how to fire up the economy. To bring life back to a weak fire  you need fresh fuel. To fire up an economy in the doldrums you need fresh money.

And this is where it all goes wrong. Economists today, as well as businesses and politicians are far too ready to fall back on borrowing as a means of generating new wealth. But as I have been writing exhaustively in every format for some long time, borrowing inflates assets, saps wealth from the base and shrinks the new wealth generating capacity of what is one of the most advanced economies in the world. The rich get every richer and everyone else sees their standard and quality of life gradually sink lower. If a benefit is to be gained from Brexit, this dreadful cycle of debt needs to end.

This requires quantitative easing, not in the financial sector, as has been the case thus far, but in the manufacturing and construction sectors. Here it must be Dynamic Quantitative Easing  which comes direct from the Treasury as cash to fund a reboot, not as loans. Without this it will not be possible for our economy to benefit fully from the falling pound, because the increase in competitiveness of our pricing of exports, will be offset by the rise in the costs  of imported raw materials and of components made overseas and used in final assembly. Too many of our component manufacturers have moved their plants overseas. To get them back and to fund new start ups we need an increase in the money supply at the base of the economy. At the same time we have to increase demand through the creation of new activity in infrastructure renewal and social housing construction. DQE is the only sound way to do this.

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