I Won't Relax My Tough Grip on the Economy: Podium from a Speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequer to the Council for Foreign Relations in New York

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THERE ARE two supremely important tasks which national governments must undertake in order to succeed in the global market-place.

First, building a platform of stability based on openness and transparency in policy-making, and secondly, pursuing structural economic reform to promote productivity and employment.

Take Britain, which we know has been more subject than most economies to the instability of boom-and-bust cycles and changing policies. In the Sixties and Seventies, attempted trade-offs between inflation and unemployment each time ended with higher inflation and higher unemployment; in the Eighties, rigid pursuit of fixed intermediate monetary and exchange …