Video runs 1 minute -- Speech -- Sep. 14, 2010
Debt and deficits run the show. Too bad King Bernanke won't follow Mervyn's lead and make national debt issues a priority. He's too busy printing.
Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, has urged the unions to accept public sector reforms and jobs cuts by warning that anything short of tackling the UK's record Budget deficit would “fail the next generation”.
- “Market reaction to rising sovereign debt can turn quickly from benign to malign, as we saw in the euro area earlier this year. It is not sensible to risk a damaging rise in long-term interest rates that would make investment and the cost of mortgages more expensive,” Mr King said.
- “The costs of this crisis will be with us for a generation. And we owe it to the next generation to seize this opportunity to put in place the reforms that will make another crisis much less likely and much less damaging.”
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Related story from this morning. Seems the U.S. is not alone in the following regard.
The Office for National Statistics found that full-time public sector staff earned an average of £74 a week more than those in the private sector. Once employer pension contributions were included, the gap rose to £136, illustrating the generous pay-and-perks deals enjoyed by local and central government workers.
The findings threaten to undermine calls by the Trades Union Congress at its conference in Manchester this week for "civil disobedience" and co-ordinated strike action in protest against the Government's planned public sector spending cuts.
- "The idea that the public should rally round these 'oppressed' workers is ludicrous," he said. "Why should their higher salaries be paid for by waitresses and hairdressers? An attack on public sector pay is not an attack on the poor but the privileged."
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