As background, the Treasury view was that fiscal policy had no effect on the total amount of economic activity and unemployment, even during times of economic recession. This view was most famously advanced in the 1930s by the staff of the British Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 2010 the UK Chancellor George Osborne implemented huge public spending cuts that he argued would result in an expansionary fiscal contraction but resulted in the slowest peacetime recovery in three hundred years since the South Sea Bubble.