Larry Elliot on the economic decade

Larry Elliot is always good value.
His summary of the decade in economics is a good one, but one that probably would have looked very different if written two years ago. Until that point we had only the threat of the debt bubble bursting.
His summary, that "governments may have to face up to a stark choice. They can carry on borrowing more, thereby accepting that public sector deficits will spiral. Or they can respond to the pressure from the financial markets and start borrowing less. The latter seems the likeliest, but it would all but guarantee a double-dip recession during 2010."
is a real lesson in real and applied economic policy. The private sector loads up with debt, the government has to bail it out. Then the financial markets gets funny about the government having all this debt, so they have to cut. the richer and powerful prosper, the poor and powerless suffer. Same old. But a very interesting lesson in 'realpolitik'