The writer, Morgan Stanley Investment Management’s chief global strategist, is author of ‘The Ten Rules of Successful Nations’
The conventional wisdom is that US President Joe Biden is ending an “era of small government” and unfettered free market capitalism that dates to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. But that era is a myth.
Since 1980, government spending has held steady, and even risen slightly as a share of gross domestic product in the US, the UK and other developed economies. Deficits have gone from rare to routine, in good years and bad. Public debt in developed countries has soared — in the US to more than 120 per cent of GDP last year. Government is just as big and more interventionist than ever.