But of course you’re changing teh goal posts now – wanting them to talk about “regulation” when “regulation” is only one viewpoint as to what could have or should be being done about this.

I for one am not in favour of more regulation, even though I’ve been cussing in public about the debt-money situaiton for at least 8 years.

“One issue that the Chancellor said nothing at all about was that of personal debt. Consumer debt is now approaching £1.2 trillion—practically identical to the gross domestic product of the United Kingdom as a whole. Of course, consumer debt has underpinned the economic boom, but the legacy for many families will be disaster. Nearly a fifth of all income is being used to service debt. That means that it is back to the level that it was at when the economy crashed under the Conservatives in the early 1990s. The immediate signs of that stress are clear: rising bankruptcies and rising repossessions.”

I’m sorry, but I don’t see how any reasonable person could ask for a clearer prediction of an approaching crash resulting from high levels of consumer debt than that. Much before that time, of course, and we were too busy being right about Iraq at PMQs.

Now you’ve seen evidence that we’ve been warning about the debt bubble through press releases, major budget day speeches and parliamentary questions for some five years, and been insistently making as much noise as possible at PMQs about the impending crisis all this year (and the last quarter of last year, of course, when Vince was acting leader).

If you want to get angry, get angry with the people who failed to pass all this information on to you. Not us.

“Every time a newspaper came out, they had the power to put in adverts to get the word out.”

Nice idea. We don’t have that kind of money. Anyway, wouldn’t it count as political marketing? Feel free to go to the party website and hit donate so that you’re never left in the dark again

Will you now be asking activists on Conservativehome.com the same questions? (I would invite you to ask Labour activists as well, but I don’t think non-members are allowed to comment).

What is clear is that Sir Campbell is concerned but he is far from calling “all hands to the pump”.

He hints that the debt level may be connected to a crash but does not go beyond that.

He does not mention a global credit crunch nor does he say that stronger regulation would be useful.

In fact, he says regulation is squeezing British business

http://tinyurl.com/636yv6

But in any case:

http://tinyurl.com/5vowts
http://tinyurl.com/58lnm6
http://tinyurl.com/6rpddy
http://tinyurl.com/5d4e89

…are all Vince Cable in 2005 and before talking in Hansard about the problems of a personal debt and house price bubble.

The links you gave seem to be from this year

I’ve focussed on the first half of the year. Here’s a warning from Clegg about the “impending winter of discontent” back in July:

http://www.libdemvoice.org/pmqs-nick-tackles-gordon-on-impending-winter-of-discontent-3023.html

And here’s Vince Cable standing in for Clegg in April on the subject of (in his own words) “economic gloom and recession”:

http://www.libdemvoice.org/todays-pmqs-2456.html

Clegg has used other PMQs this year to go into more detail about consequences of the expected economic collapse – food prices, fuel poverty, housing repossessions, high taxes etc – stretching back to his first PMQs as leader in January:

http://www.libdemvoice.org/pmqs-nick-tackles-gordon-on-fuel-poverty-2888.html

http://www.libdemvoice.org/pmqs-nick-tackles-gordon-on-pverty-2618.html

http://www.libdemvoice.org/pmqs-nick-tackles-gordon-on-the-10p-tax-con-2585.html

http://www.libdemvoice.org/pmqs-nick-tackles-gordon-on-home-repossessions-2-2426.html

http://www.libdemvoice.org/pmqs-nick-tackles-gordon-on-northern-rock-and-energy-prices-2210.html

http://www.libdemvoice.org/pmqs-nick-tackles-gordon-on-home-repossessions-1998.html

Did you read any coverage of these repeated highlightings of burgeoning economic problems in the press?

Can you tell me of if any PMQs had that explicit warning? What dates? I would like to look it up for myself

Face it – you said something which you now realize to be wrong. Vince and others – Matthew Taylor in his position before him for example, as well as Huhne and Kennedy, have been needling about many of these issues for years. And have had quite a lot of coverage for it.

The fact that apparently nobody listened, including yourself, is not “our fault”.

You can see for yourself above that Vince Cable has been asking questions in parliament about the debt crisis for years. And you might have heard Evan Davis on Today the other morning telling George Osborne that he had been receiving emails about dangerous consumer debt from Vince every three weeks when he (Evan) was BBC Economics editor, going back to the beginning of the decade. Those are the usual methods of churning out a message to people – press releases and public challenges to the government – and it just didn’t work here.

Sad but true: if the press don’t want to report something because they think it’s boring, or they think the Lib Dems are irrelevant or whatever, then they won’t, and unless you take a forensic daily interest in Lib Dem policy (or whatever it might be) you won’t get to hear about it.

Every time a newspaper came out, they had the power to put in adverts to get the word out.

Every PMQs, there was an opportunity to say that there was a critical danger to the economoy which was not being addressed.

Was there a warning about the crunch in every party conference? No, of course not, because then it would have been a big story and people would have known about it.

This is a big priority and the ball was dropped by all three parties.

All these things are possible

It may have escaped your notice but the Lib Dems, sadly, do not run the government.

Had they succeeded in getting their way when they were last in power as a predecessor party (ie Asquith and Lloyd-George and so on) none of this would have been possible – the property speculation bubble I mean.

I judge people by results not aspirations

If you want the credit for being right in advance, you have to speak out.

A man in the cave with the solutions to all our worries is useless.

Cable must resign but no one takes responsibility for his actions these days

I do not see how to arrive at any other conclusion

However those clever peoples’ opinions, even if a “minority report” at the time, should have fed into some kind of risk management strategy on the part of government at least who could be merrily inventing spending plans and golden rules blissfully unaware that there might be a potential problem…

Just like they have. What we know now is that Prudence was never actually there, else she would have taken this into account in her risk analysis. However, that risk analysis must always have been flawed if government and their agencies were the ones wanting to talk the asset bubble up in the first place as a piece of economic policy.