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  Phil - economies work over cycles of growth and decline, it is an inevitable as night following day. Brown's hubris in his claim to have banished boom and bust gives you a clue as to why we are in such a mess.
  
  The nations finances can be thought of in the same way as your own but just more complex. As your income rises you can spend more and borrow more but that borrowing must always be servicable and must be repaid. When your income falls for some reason you find it more difficult to manage and are at risk perhaps of defaulting on debt. Where a country is different is that it can just print money (quantative easing) but even so that creates another bill that will need to be repaid, that bill is in the form of domestically induced inflation.
  
  The time when a nation should be repaying its debt burden is during the growth cycle of the economy so when the economy slows down it can afford to increase spending to stimulate demand (such as lowe interst rates, lower taxes, capital spending and revenue spending through inevitable increased burden of benefit payments).
  
  Brown did not do the latter. While the economy was growing he spent more and borrowed more so when we entered the slowdown there was already huge debt levels. There is an argument over figures for that because so much of the UK debt is 'off balance sheet' as pension debt and PFI debt, but it is debt nevertheless that the public will have to repay through taxes. Brown has critised companies for hiding problems by false accounting but that is exactly what he has been doing (Enron anybody?).
  
  The other big mistake was his changes to banking regulation that led to the crippling of our banks and making the recession in the UK a lot worse.
  
  You cannot just blame US banks or the 'world economy'. He failed to manage our economy in a sensible manner and as a result of that and his regulatory changes the world recession for the UK got a whole lot worse.
  
  I would rank him at the bottom of Chancellors, the most disasterous we have ever had.

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