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Economy

UK PM Gives Frightening Forecast For Nation’s Finances

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Prime Minister David Cameron of the UK is no Winston Churchill. He gave a chilling speech about the future of his nation’s finances, perhaps as a possible means to frighten its citizens to accept austerity. He began his maiden speech on the nation’s economic future by saying sharp spending cuts were absolutely necessary. “Why we need to do this.  Why the overall scale of the problem is even worse than we thought.  And why its potential consequences are therefore more critical than we feared.”Cameron blamed the previous government for the country’ s problems, but that is academic now. Cameron’s forecasts are that the public debt could reach 1.4 trillion pounds in five years. The annual interest payments on that are expected to be 70 billion pounds. “£70 billion means spending more on debt interest than we currently do on running schools in England plus climate change plus transport,” he said

Cameron’s speech will likely gain him nothing with the voters who put him into office. The intransigence that public official in Greece, Spain, Portugal, and even Germany face as they attempt to make cuts in entitlements is strong. Powerful unions in each nation will fight them to the detriment of GDP if necessary.

Cameron may believe he has a mandate,  but it only goes as far as what the British believes that the government owes them

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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