Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Generation debt

The front page of today's Independent reveals the scope of how much debt individual students run up when studying today - around 16K (see here). What an example to give young people starting out in life. If anyone hasn't yet spotted it, the recent stock-market dip was down to a growing realisation that bad debt is unsustainable and there's a very real danger we'll burst the bubble we're currently in. And yet people keep spending irresponsibly. Gone are the days when if you couldn't afford something you went without it - now people spend now, then remortgage later.

This government's "proud" economic record has been built on cheating the system by encouraging spending on the never never - sooner or later someone has to pay the piper, and I'm guessing Labour thought they'd be out of office when that time came around. Instead, it looks increasingly likely that Gordon Brown will preside over the fallout from his own economic policies, which might be good for karma, but not so good for the rest of us - even those who try to limit their debts to a mortgage and nothing else.

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