It started with a letter.
On 28 November 2020 24 economists wrote to the BBC about a metaphor used for the UK economy. In a discussion of borrowing forecasts, Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC’s political editor at the time, had said: “This is the credit card, the national mortgage, everything absolutely maxed out.” While the letter writers acknowledged that Kuenssberg and fellow BBC journalists had also mentioned other views of the economy, they feared “household budget” analogies greatly influenced “the public’s understanding of economics, even though they do not represent economic reality”.
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