Thursday 29 September 2022 02:05 AM DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Jittery Tories risk fuelling market misery trends now
Global markets are in turmoil, the strengthening dollar is hitting all currencies, inflation is rampant everywhere and the era of historically low borrowing is ending.
These are indeed anxiety-inducing days, but Britain is not uniquely engulfed in this mayhem. The entire world is suffering the shockwaves from the Covid lockdown and Russia's war in Ukraine.
Why, then, has the International Monetary Fund singled out the UK – a G7 economy, hardly an emerging market – for a humiliating rebuke over its response to the crisis?
The truth is, the organisation detests Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng's bold low-tax, pro-growth mini-Budget, because it challenges every grinding liberal economic orthodoxy that it and its fellow travellers have preached for over a decade.
The Chancellor's (pictured) biggest intervention by far, the £150billion energy bills freeze, will reduce inflation
The package, it warns, risks fuelling inflation. Yet the Chancellor's biggest intervention by far, the £150billion energy bills freeze, will reduce inflation. Compared to this bailout, his tax cuts and changes – even if unfunded – are a drop in the ocean.
The IMF also claims the measures will increase inequality – apparently by benefiting high earners. But isn't it supposed to be making economic judgments – not unsolicited and overtly political ones?
And anyway, Britain is far less unequal than many countries – including the US.
The fact is, the UK's tax burden is at the highest since the 1940s. If Mr Kwarteng is to succeed in jolting the sclerotic economy back to life, it simply has to come down.
Of course, IMF forecasts have been wrong for years. That didn't stop the Government's enemies – advocates of the failed economic consensus, Remainers refighting the Brexit battles of
