Sir, As we look forward to the Pre-Budget Report (PBR) there is inevitability a great deal of debate about the best pace and scale of reductions in the deficit and about how to balance the likely solutions of economic growth, tax and spend.

These are important concerns the Chancellor will want to address but the more immediate focus of the PBR is the financial year ahead. As economists with a variety of specialties, we urge the Chancellor to resist any temptation to start cutting public spending in 2010/11.

Despite improvement in the outlook, taking risks at this point while recovery is delicate would risk a return to recession. What progress has been made towards recovery in the UK and abroad has been, in some considerable part, due to decisions by governments to increase spending as a stimulus, to actively support labour markets and to accept higher deficits as an inevitable outcome of these measures.

To reverse this policy just when it is having an effect would be mistaken. Although, in such unusual times, it is difficult to be sure of the best actions to take, we feel that the balance of risk suggests our country should be more concerned about a likely deepening of unemployment than about possible inflationary pressure.

Reducing the deficit now through spending cuts would undermine the recovery and ultimately damage the public finances further.

From a long list of economists no less. Will Darling listen?

Other speculation in the Financial Times on Darling's plans for the pre budegt report includes:

Alistair Darling, chancellor, is preparing a crackdown on “extraordinarily high” bankers’ bonuses when he makes his pre-Budget report on Wednesday, but is expected to reject a windfall tax on bank profits.
...
Any tax on bankers would not make a big dent in an expected deficit of about £180bn, but Mr Darling knows the political sensitivity of allowing bankers at part-nationalised banks to walk off with huge pay-outs.

“We are not going to be held to ransom by people who believe you can pay extraordinarily high bonuses without regard to what’s going on,” Mr Darling told the BBC’s Andrew Marr programme.

Chris Sanger, head of tax policy at Ernst & Young, said the most likely mechanism to meet these ambitions would be a special tax for high-income individuals who receive a large proportion of their income in one month of the year. “The impact would be to change the nature and system of banking pay,” he said.

Meanwhile, Mr Darling has ruled out any windfall tax on the profits of banks. “We’ve just spent taxpayers’ money trying to make the banks stronger: it doesn’t make much sense to take it back again now,” said one Treasury official.

Is it too much to hope that public spending won't be drastically cut and outrageous bankers bonuses might be curbed?