Is Britain on the road to disaster?

George Osborne is now relying on quantitative easing to fund spending. That is dangerous, says John Stepek – investors should act now to protect their wealth. Here, he explains how.

You're the Chancellor of the Exchequer. You've set yourself some admittedly fairly arbitrary targets for the public finances. It looks like you're going to miss them. You've got a big speech, the autumn statement, coming up on 5 December.

What do you do? Admit that things aren't quite working out as you'd hoped, and brace yourself for the taunts from the opposition? Decide that the answer is more of the same that we need more cuts, even though they won't be popular? Or decide that it's time to use the ongoing slowdown to push for some radical solutions, such as a genuine simplification and overhauling of Britain's ridiculously complicated tax system?

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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.