英伦广角 2009-03-22 专家警告英政府大幅增加借贷

Everyone’s got an opinion about how bad the global recession will be and what to do about it. Just as Gordon Brown has been trying to get European leaders to pump more money into their economies, respected forecasters, the Ernst and Young ITEM Club are warning that can’t be done in the UK.

Government borrowing is already on track to hit a record high of 180 billion pounds over the next financial year they say. That’s mainly because the Treasury 1 isn’t being paid so much in tax.

“The real problem is that as a country, we are heavily dependent upon the city for tax revenue. We’ve already seen the Chancellor 2 lose 6,7 billion pounds with the stamp duty. That’s the tip of an iceberg 3. And next year we’ll see some very big hits from corporation tax and income tax too.”

The report says the Chancellor faces a serious dilemma 4 for the budget next month: put up taxes or cut spending. Some in opposition 5 agree.

“What we need to do is restrain public spending, get government living within its means and over time deal with this massive massive deficit 6, because at the moment we are stacking up debts that our children will pay for many decades to come.”

But the government says to cut back on spending now would be a mistake.

This week unemployment hit two million and it’s set to rise even further. That means people have less money to spend. Businesses find their profits are getting weaker and they cut back on their output. And the Treasury gets less money from everyone’s tax bills. So for the moment, the government argues it has to keep public spending up to stop the problem getting worse. But the gap between what’s coming in and what’s going out is getting wider. When the recovery does happen, whoever’s in power will need to take some tough decisions on how to pay back what’s been borrowed.

"We’ve begun to sketch 7 out some of the very difficult areas that government is gonna have to look at, including things like public sector 8 pension commitments which are very generous, some of our big long-term defense 9 commitments, the tax credit scheme. I mean all these things are very generous at the moment, and they are gonna have to be reappraised."

Domestically and globally the picture’s bleak 10. 2009 will be a dangerous year according to the World Bank.

"The IMF came out with a new global forecast recently, close to decline of about 1% of growth. We at the Bank will be coming out with ours soon, you know, probably in the range of 1 to 2 percent, but to put that number in a context, you haven’t seen a figure like that globally since World War II which really means since the Great Depression."

The G-20 Finance Ministers’ meeting last week made it clear that the pressure is growing for the main gathering 11 in London to come up with ideas for sustainable rescue.