Bloomberg sharp for Belgium: ‘Spends like America, minus the impunity of the dollar’

The chronic lack of Belgian budgetary discipline is being sharply exposed by Bloomberg, the most influential voice on the financial markets.

‘In the capital of a world power, a chronically dysfunctional politician spends far beyond its means in the run-up to elections and debts are rising rapidly. Sounds like the United States, but we are talking about Belgium. This is how the Bloomberg news agency, the most influential voice in the world on the financial markets, kicks off a portrait of the worrying state of Belgian public finances.

Pro memoria: if policy remains unchanged, our country’s budget deficit will reach 45 billion euros by 2029, which would increase the debt ratio to almost 120 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). There is no plan in any election program to get the deficit below 3 percent of GDP by 2029.

Bloomberg rightly notes that dysfunctional politics as a free pass for uncontrolled spending is not unique. In Washington, Democrats and Republicans agree on one thing: increasing the budget deficit, the first with stimulus plans and the second with tax cuts. For the budget year to the end of September, the deficit amounted to almost $ 1,700 billion, the total American debt mountain has risen to $ 34,559 billion.

There is one crucial difference, the news agency writes: ‘With a population the size of Ohio and a slightly smaller GDP than that American state, the lack of discipline is increasingly showing similarities with the world’s largest economy, but without the impunity that weighs on it. of the dollar’.

As issuers of the world’s most important reserve currency, Americans enjoy an ‘exorbitant privilege’, the then French Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing complained in the 1960s. Or as former American Treasury Secretary John Connally put it to the rest of the world in the 1970s: ‘the dollar is our currency and your problem’.

What is saving Belgium for the time being are its wealthy citizens. The same citizens who signed up en masse last year for the tax-advantaged one-year government voucher. Finally, Bloomberg gives the floor to the ‘godfather’ of that government bond, Minister of Finance Vincent Van Peteghem. “We have to avoid someone else telling us what to do.”