Recession Risk: One in Three
George Osborne sounded very clear in his statement:
The central forecast we publish today from the independent Office for Budget Responsibility does not predict a recession here in Britain.
Which is factually true – the OBR’s central forecast is that Britain will avoid an actual recession and just experience extremely weak growth. But a casual listener to the Chancellor’s speech might assume that the OBR had entirely ruled out the possibly of a double dip. Far from it, as this chart demonstrates:
As they make very clear there is a ‘roughly one- in-three chance that the economy will shrink between 2012 and 2013”.
Let’s hope their central forecast turns out to right but as the chart makes clear – there is still a lot of risk around their (already awful) central forecast.