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The Economy

I am just posing this as a question; I do not actually know the answer. A few weeks ago, Paul Volcker made a speech about the intrinsic problems of the American economy. One of the things he said was that in the past decade, there had been a sharp increase of about 5 per cent. in aggregate expenditure—that is, public and private and capital formation put together—to the point of about 105 per cent. of GDP. We have the same situation; for us it is about 103 per cent. One of the points about the external borrowings is that they constrain what we can safely do before running into the creditworthiness problem. How would the hon. Gentleman get around the fact that spending got us into this problem and that spending therefore may not take us out in a safe manner?