Samuel Brittan Worries About Secular Stagnation
He writes:
A long cool look at budget deficits: it would have been much better if the UK could have entered the [current] recession with much lower initial deficit and borrowing ratios – if only because the financial markets do not understand the very good arguments for fiscal deficits in depressed times.... What fundamentally is wrong with a budget deficit? The basic argument is that if borrowing is too high the government can get into a debt trap, having to borrow more and more simply to pay the interest on past borrowings.... Keynes in his General Theory maintained, however, that the propensity to save was much greater than the private propensity to invest, not just at the bottom of a recession but more or less permanently – a state known as secular stagnation.... We could easily have a good few years in which secular stagnation might seem to prevail again, if only because of the near destruction of the world financial system. If we are in such a state then an attempt to adhere rigidly to a fiscal rule could lead to a permanent and unnecessary loss of output outweighing any welfare loss from the debt trap risk itself.
I have sympathy with those economists who favour a mainly monetary approach to sustaining demand. But I fear that the present dangers are great enough to require a belt and braces – monetary and fiscal – approach. I go back to an early suggestion of Milton Friedman... tax rates should be set to balance government spending at a hypothetical level of national income corresponding to “reasonably full employment at a pre-determined price level”... the beauty of the suggestion is that, should the economy go back to a recognisable trend growth rate, then the budget would automatically achieve the target balance. Yet should there really be secular stagnation then deficits would run on as long as necessary...
