As the Bank of England have acknowledged, the current recovery has been associated with a decline in the household savings ratio (the percentage of their income that households save in aggregate). As the latest Inflation Report puts it: The UK economy grew by 1.9% in 2013, the strongest annual growth rate for six years. Much…
I’ve got a post up at Left Foot Forward looking at today’s labour market statistics. As in recent months, today’s figures were broadly good news but with causes for concern behind the headlines. Wage growth remains weak and the labour market is a long way from ‘normal’.
Worrying about the ‘next recession’ when we still haven’t fully recovered from the last one seems like an especially depressing way to spend one’s time. But over the last few days, ever since Mark Carney’s press conference on Wednesday, it’s something that has been bothering me. To take the obvious point first – we still…
I think, and the FT’s Chris Giles agrees, that this is the most important chart in British macroeconomics at the moment: It shows the fall and stagnation in labour productivity since the recession. In yesterday’s Economic Review, the ONS provided another useful way of looking at this: As they put it: Weak labour productivity is…
Headline growth of 0.7% might be a tad down from the 0.8% recorded in Q3 but still represents a solid result. The overall growth rate in 2013 has come in at 1.9% – still below the pre-crisis norm of around 2.5% but much better than the 0.6% the OBR was expecting back in March. There…
Q4 GDP figures are out tomorrow. NIESR (who are usually pretty right) are forecasting growth of 0.7%, whilst survey data is a bit more bullish and points to a quarter on quarter growth rate of 1.0%. The headline number will be closely watched tomorrow – as will the breakdown of growth between services, construction…
The Government are today claiming that ‘take home pay’ has risen for 90% of workers. If true this would be excellent news but I’m afraid there a quite a few reasons to take these figures with more than pinch of salt. To start with it is important to be clear exactly what the government the…
I blogged on the latest labour market statistics over at Left Foot Forward yesterday. My central argument was that whilst jobs growth has been very strong, there are worrying trends in both pay and productivity. I am starting to think that the labour market has undergone quite a large compostional change over the past five…
The IMF, as was widely trailed (first I believe by Sky’s Ed Conway) has upgraded its UK growth forecasts for 2014 and 2015. It now expects growth of 2.4% this year and 2.2% next – exactly in line with the current OBR projections but a tad below independent forecasters where the average of new forecasts…
Most of the responses to Ed Miliband’s speech today will probably focus on his call for more competition in the banking sector (the broad outline of this policy was first announced in July 2012) but I think the introduction and sections before the actual policy call were more interesting. Whilst a call to break up…