There’s only one way out of the UK’s mess: default

Forget the austerity versus stimulus debate. When things get this bad, there’s only one solution. Default. John Stepek explains why, and looks at the choices facing Britain.

The austerity versus stimulus' debate continues to grip the pundits on the political and business pages.

Broadly speaking, if you lean towards the right, you believe in austerity but you still want tax cuts. If you lean to the left, you believe in stimulus even although it means massive implicit bail-outs for the banks and the asset-rich wealthy.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.