== Budget 2013 == 

 Three former members of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) have launched a scathing attack on George Osborne’s handling of the economy, ahead of Wednesday’s Budget.  

 Speaking to the Huffington Post UK, economists Sushil Wadhwani, Adam Posen and David Blanchflower call the chancellor’s austerity measures "premature", “self-defeating” and "completely at odds with economic theory". They argue that the UK is now in the midst of a Japanese-style 'lost decade' of economic stagnation and high unemployment.  

 “It’s difficult to believe that coalition policy hasn’t made things worse,” says Wadhwani. "The debate is: how much worse?" 

 ‘MOST INEPT CHANCELLOR IN 100 YEARS’ 

 Between them, these three leading economists have almost a decade’s experience on the MPC, with Posen’s term on the Bank of England committee having overlapped with Osborne’s first two years at the Treasury.  

 Now president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington DC, Posen says the prime minister and his chancellor are in denial. “They seem to be ignoring the negative feedback loop from their own austerity measures - and particularly their killing of public investment - on their actual revenues,” he tells HuffPost UK. “They seem to be ignoring all the evidence from the past two or three years.”  

 He adds: "The current programme is not even working on its narrow terms of reducing the deficit so any responsible government should reconsider its programme." 

 According to Wadhwani, founder and CEO of Wadhwani Asset Management and a visiting professor at the London School of Economics (LSE): “This is by far the weakest recovery – if you want to call it a recovery – since the inter-war years. We’ve underperformed many other economies in a similar situation.”  

 To what does he attribute this underperformance? “I think it was premature fiscal tightening… it would have been more appropriate to delay the fiscal tightening.” 

 Blanchflower goes further. The chancellor’s austerity measures have “completely failed”, says the professor of economics at Dartmouth College in the United States. Osborne, he adds, is the “most inept chancellor in 100 years. We have the worst economic recovery since the late 19th century.”