Beware the balancing act in George Osborne’s false economy

The chancellor's doctrinaire insistence on a surplus in both current and capital accounts is truly astonishing in a looming worldwide economic slowdown

The more one sees of George Osborne - and this is not a chancellor who keeps himself to himself - the more he appears to be a practitioner of the false economy.

Everyone knows what a false economy is: you make a shortsighted saving which only serves to postpone the agony and leads to the need for greater expenditure in the future. In Osborne's case, this criticism applies at both the macro level (policy that affects the workings of the economy as a whole) and the micro level (policy that affects individual sectors, both public and private, and the household).

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