Can UK default on national debt? Yes! Only Question Time EVER to discuss. Winner: Germaine Greer

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• published: 28 Sep 2015
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Skip straight to the best bit from Germaine Greer https://youtu.be/ASjQGhagBgQ?t=4m3s Here's the complete episode from Wrexham - 29th January 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7hgQ4BmizA Sajid Javid MP: Conservative Culture Secretary Peter Hain MP: Former Labour Secretary of State for Wales Rhun ap Iorwerth AM: Plaid Cymru's Economy Spokesman Germaine Greer: Author and Critic Kate Maltby: Telegraph.co.uk Blogger (a diabolical performance) Only mass default will end the world's addiction to debt As global debt rises off the scale, creditors stand to take a huge hit in a threatened tsunami of defaults http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/jeremy-warner/11448051/Only-mass-default-will-end-the-worlds-addiction-to-debt.html Argentina's Christina Kirshner seems to regard default as a matter of some national pride It will be you next. Argentina's Christina Kirchner seems to regard default as a matter of some national pride Photo: Reuters Jeremy Warner By Jeremy Warner7:04PM GMT 03 Mar 2015 In a valedictory speech at the weekend of characteristically Latin American duration – a mind-numbing three hours – the Argentine president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, claimed that her country was the only one in the world to have reduced its national debt over recent years. I doubt she is right about being alone in this “achievement” – there must surely be others - but even if she is, I’m not sure that reduction in the national debt via the mechanism of default is anything to boast of. Only Kirchner could think this a matter of national pride. Nonetheless, where Argentina treads, others will surely soon be following. The world is sinking under a sea of debt, private as well as public, and it is increasingly hard to see how this might end, except in some form of mass default. Greece we already know about, but the coming much wider outbreak of debt repudiation will not be confined to sovereign nations. Last week, there was another foretaste of what’s to come in developments at Austria’s failed Hypo Alpe-Adria-Bank International. Taxpayers have had enough of paying for the country’s increasingly crisis-ridden banking sector, and have determined to bail in private creditors to the remnants of this financial road crash instead - to the tune of $8.5bn in the specific case of Hypo Alpe-Adria. Finally, creditors are being made to pay for the consequences of their own folly. You might have thought that a financial crisis as serious as that of the past seven years would have ended the world economy’s addiction to debt once and for all. It has not. If anything, the position has grown even worse since the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Related Articles Cowardly politicians aren’t up to fixing NHS 27 Feb 2015 Don’t bother to save - there’s no point any more 28 Feb 2015 Jeremy Warner: Greece is on a fast track out of the euro 14 Feb 2015 Jeremy Warner: Despite the boasts, UK is bottom on deficit reduction 07 Feb 2015 According to recent analysis by McKinsey Global Institute, global debt has increased to the tune of $57 trillion, or 17pc, since 2007, with little sign of a slowdown in sight. Much of this growth has been in emerging markets, which were comparatively unaffected by the financial crisis. Yet even in the developed West, private sector deleveraging has been limited and, in any case, more than outweighed by growing public indebtedness. The combined public sector debt of the G7 economies has grown by 40 percentage points to around 120pc of GDP since the crisis began, according to the Bank of International Settlements. There has been no overall deleveraging to speak of. Where the West left off, Asia has taken up the pace, with a credit-induced real estate bubble that makes its pre-crisis Western counterpart look tame by comparison, much of it fuelled, as in Western economies, by growth in the shadow banking sector. China’s total indebtedness has quadrupled since 2007 to $28 trillion, according to estimates by McKinsey. At 282pc of GDP, the debt burden is now bigger, relative to output, that the US. Attempts to rein in this growth have so far proved problematic. The Chinese property market has slowed markedly, which in turn has knocked the stuffing out of the all-important construction sector and its feeder industries. Starved of its regular fix of debt, the Chinese economy seems as incapable of generating decent levels of growth as the mature economies of the West. The addiction to credit has gone global....