Carlh

http://pro.moneyweek.com/myk-eob-tpr123/PMYKP703/

Ive been watching 20 mins or so, so far. Fascinating and frightening. Its not directed to a political party. Watch, check up on the facts, says it in plain english.

Matteeboy

Bear in mind they want to sell you some magazines. However much of it is accurate and one of the few places that tells it like it is.

Mouser

I wonder if George Osborne will take out a Moneyweek subscription.

warrenm2

Selective out of context hype. Yes its absolutely true about the national debt rising to dangerous levels but they ram the point home by comparing us to Greece. However they forget to mention the cash generating abilities of the countries. They add in personal debt, which is irrelavent. At the beginning they say Moneyweek successfully predicted crashes, but dont say when their predictions were wrong. There graph on debt is not inflation adjusted and mysteriously doesn't add in the debt from WW1 and WW2. So a whole lot of selective bias and cherry picking. No individual statement is wrong, but through lack of context, is misleading.

Matteeboy

So you think our economy is healthy then?

warrenm2

Not at all, as I acknowledge in my post I say the UK national debt IS rising to dangerous levels. (In fact it ignores other liabilities such as pension and bank liabilities, which make the true figure approx 7tn not the 1tn in the video) I'm simply saying that video is selectively picking facts and is misleading by omission of relevant context. And there is an error in the historical debt graph as it does not show WW1 and WW2 debts. I didn't bother watching the whole thing as I got the flavour in the first 5 mins though. The situation is more complex than they present, and different inferences will be drawn with more context.

Matteeboy

As I said, take it with a pinch of sales salt BUT the fundamentals are there - whether WW1 and 2 debt were worse (the economy will always melt down in war time), we're still extremely badly off and MORE in debt than we have ever been before.

We have a health service we can't afford, our pension liabilities are unsustainable yet we have almost NOTHING to show for it - at least the Western Europe we claim is worse off than us actually has a good transport network, some healthy companies, etc.

We've got naff all - just a broken financial system and ermmm...we export a few cars owned by foreign firms...

tony de wonderful

The public sector pension liabilities are a genuine time bomb.

warrenm2

Agreed. According to this book, in Dec 2010 the figure was assessed at £1.165tn

hodgy0_2

The politicians and economist who compared our economic situation to that of the Greeks have perpetrated the biggest con on the English people since we were told that we had a chance of winning the 2006 World Cup