Former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng has said he told former Prime Minister Liz Truss to “slow down” her ambitious economic reforms, which caused market turmoil and eventually led to her resignation.
After Truss became prime minister on Sept. 5, she set out to implement her economic vision for the UK to become a “low-tax, high-growth economy that would take advantage of the freedoms of Brexit.”
Her government used the “mini-budget,” delivered by Kwarteng on Sept. 23, to jump-start her new economic programme—nicknamed “Trussonomics”—with massive tax cuts worth £45 billion ($50 billion).
But it went badly wrong, as her plan to fund the tax cuts with government borrowing instead of spending cuts led to fears of unsustainable government debt levels. The ensuing turmoil in the financial markets caused the pound to fall steeply against the dollar and led to an increase in borrowing costs for both the government and British households….