IEA Head of Lifestyle Economics Christopher Snowdon has written for The Daily Mail arguing that decades of increasing money supply and national debt are responsible for the current economic crisis.

Christopher wrote:

“some people, far from being concerned about our ballooning national debt, took the opportunity to claim that the gargantuan sum proved that successive UK governments had been miserly to borrow so little after the financial crash of 2008, and to inflict ‘austerity’ instead.

That was — and is — nonsense. We borrowed more than £700 billion between 2010 and 2019. And UK governments had, in fact, been spending more than they took in taxes every single year for two decades, borrowing a total of £1.4 trillion since 2001.”

Turning his criticism to monetary policymakers, Christopher said:

“Central bankers had convinced themselves that inflation was a thing of the past, and since they saw interest rates as nothing more than a tool to control prices, the days of high interest rates were also thought to be over.”

The full article can be read here.