Realist, not conformist analysis of the latest financial, business and political news

The Guardian Says We’re Doing Terribly – Except For The Times We’ve Done Worse

This might not be the most terrifying economic story ever if we’re to be accurate about it:

The British economy is on track for the weakest year outside a recession since the second world war, as political turmoil and Brexit uncertainty dragged down growth, a Guardian analysis reveals.

A recession being defined as a sustained period of negative economic growth. So, we’ve got the weakest economy since 1945 except for those times it was weaker. Like 1956, 1961, the mid 70s, the later mid 70s, the early 80s, early 90s and late 00s.

We could also look at this in another manner. Economic growth is positive – in contrast to the dire warnings of rains of blood if we had the temerity to vote for Brexit. So we’re doing rather well then…..

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David Morris
David Morris
4 years ago

Accurate & the Graun are distant bedfellows……..That’s always been the case, but since Mid 2016 they seem to have slipped into the demented side of the duvet

Andrew Carey
Andrew Carey
4 years ago

The greatest two quarters in UK history as measured by that measure of production,income and consumption are the last two. Anaemic growth from an all time high still results in a new all time high.
The Guardian made a similar mistake when describing net EU migration as dipping to its lowest point since 2003. It was still a positive number which pushed EU migration to an all time high, meaning the claim that the shortage of pigs in blankets was due to insufficient immigrants of a kind who are in the UK in record numbers look a bit dodgy.

Barks
Barks
4 years ago

American liberals love to talk about the “drastic and damaging” cuts to government funding when what actually occurred was that the growth of government spending for the period increased at a slightly lower rate.

Spike
Spike
4 years ago

Andrew, Barks, I thought we already established that the Guardian economics writers cannot distinguish the data from the first derivative! What’s happening here is artificially restricting the sample set, something less attributable to ignorance.

I recently read a political candidate bragging that his average contributor gave a remarkably proletarian amount (excluding the high-rollers).

Bernie G.
Bernie G.
4 years ago

This is one of the reasons that Millennials struggle to accumulate wealth. They read these dire Guardian forecasts and either squirrel their savings away at 0.5% interest or blow everything on an experience – a trip to Thailand. There is no way the current economy can compare with the 1970s.

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