Recession

Wednesday

James Forsyth

The economy adds to Cameron’s woes

This morning brought the economic news that the coalition has been dreading: the country has double dipped. Now, this is based on preliminary figures which may well be revised up. But, as Pete says, the political impact of this story will be huge. The government’s handling of the economy has now been caught up in this whole argument about competence. It provides quite a back-drop to Rupert Murdoch’s testimony today. PMQs today has now taken on a special significance. Ed Miliband has two massive targets to aim at, the Jeremy Hunt revelations from yesterday and these GDP figures. For Cameron it will be his most testing appearance at the despatch

Peter Hoskin

Our economy fell back into recession

Or at least technically-speaking it did. The figures released this morning suggest that the economy shrank by 0.2 per cent in the first quarter of this year, which is the second quarter of shrinkage in a row after last winter’s 0.3 per cent fall. The numbers are tiny, but the politics is huge. It’s a double dip — and you can expect Ed Miliband to mention that fact again and again in PMQs later, with dread accompaniment from Ed Balls and his hand gestures. There are some caveats, of course. This is only a preliminary estimate, so the Office for National Statistics could revise it upwards at some point. It’s

Wednesday

Jonathan Jones

The recession: four years and counting

It is now four years since recession hit the UK. It took just over three years for GDP to return to pre-recession levels in the much milder downturns of the ‘70s and the ‘90s. Even after the Great Depression of the 30s, the economy had fully recovered by this point. By contrast, economic output in 2011 Q4 was still 3.8 per cent down on 2008 Q1. And it’s going to take a while longer to get back. The OBR’s projections suggest the economy won’t have fully recovered until the end of 2013. Other forecasts are gloomier still. But even if we do manage it by then, it’ll have taken us

Monday

Jonathan Jones

Bringing the squeeze into focus

The ‘word of the year’ for 2011 is already featuring prominently in 2012. Yep, the ‘squeezed middle’ is the focus of the Resolution Foundation’s latest report, which they launched in central London earlier today. It’s a fascinating and nicely presented study, and I’d recommend you read it in full: this think tank really is very good at choosing the most revealing metrics to bring some clarity to an often vague debate. But, in the meantime, here are some of the things that stood out to me from today’s event:   1. The squeeze started long before the recession. Talk of the ‘squeezed middle’ often focuses on the impact of the

Monday

Peter Hoskin

Osborne visits China, but can’t escape Europe

Yet another day here in Westminster that’s all about the economy. Nick Clegg has just delivered a speech on the subject to Mansion House, focusing on ‘responsible capitalism’, which we’ll blog shortly. And two prominent forecasting groups, the Ernst & Young ITEM Club and the Centre for Economic and Business Research, have suggested that we’re effectively back in recession. They both reckon that the economy shrank in the final quarter of last year, and is wilting even further in this current quarter. But, like the OECD, they also predict that this ‘double dip’ will be relatively short-lived and relatively mild. Against that backdrop, enter George Osborne. The Chancellor spoke from

Monday

Daniel Korski

Behold post-Putin Russia

Sunday’s parliamentary elections in Russia marked the beginning of the end of the Putin era. It won’t feel like it for another few years, as the Russian strongman ascends to the nation’s Presidency again and bestrides the international stage. But when future historians come to examine post-Putin Russia, the end of 2011 will be seen as the point at which the transition began. Exit polls showed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party with less than 50 per cent of the vote. United Russia held a two-thirds majority in the outgoing State Duma. The significant drop in support for United Russia — despite electoral fraud and with only tame parties

Monday

Peter Hoskin

Those gloomy OECD projections in full

Thanks to the tremors along Westminster’s grapevine, we already knew that today’s OECD Economic Outlook would make for pretty dreary reading. But now that the report is actually out, we can see the organisation’s numbers for ourselves. The headline point appears to be that the eurozone is in, or is facing, ‘mild recession’. Or to put it in graphic form: And the current situation isn’t look particularly encouraging for the UK either. The first heading in the section on us reads ‘The economy is weakening sharply’. And a subsequent pair of graphs predicts, first, that we’ll experience a mild recession of our own across the next two quarters, and then

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

Cable can’t make any promises

Did you realise that today is the first anniversary of the government’s Spending Review? Neither did I until the politicians started making a fuss about it, starting with Vince Cable on the TV last night. We’ll post video footage of the Business Secretary’s performance when we can, but this write-up here just about covers it. He made a few earcatching remarks — among them that “we didn’t know that there would be a major crisis in our export markets and that energy prices would shoot up” — but one has captured the headlines more than any other. Asked whether he could promise that we wouldn’t experience a double-dip recession, Cable

Monday

Clarissa Tan

Euro-zonked

Well, so much for that. The FTSE 100 fell as much as 1.7 per cent this morning, while overnight the euro and Asian stock markets tumbled, after Europe’s leaders announced their grand 2-trillion-euro plan over the weekend to drag the Eurozone out of the mire. It appears the markets are well past the point of believing that political leaders can get us out of this mess. The consensus is that the plan is not concrete enough. Of course, equities may recover a bit later, as they have been prone to do in past days. But the whipsawing itself is the worst sign of all; stock investors and retail-end funds are

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Time for the QE gamble, again

It’s time to warm up the printing presses. When growth evaporates and governments feel politically unable to cut spending or raise taxes, there’s only one tool left: printing more money. We can expect more of it soon. As James says today, Osborne believes he has created the conditions where the Bank of England can do some more Quantitative Easing and it could start as early as next month; an unusual move, given how high inflation is. But the Bank is (as ever) forecasting a return to the 2 per cent target soon – and may now claim that economic weakness makes an undershoot likely. And so (the logic will run)

Sunday

James Forsyth

Darling lifts lid on Brown’s chaotic government

Tieless, Alistair Darling appeared on Marr this morning to discuss his memoir. As with so many of these New Labour autobiographies, there was the strong whiff of a therapy session. At one point, Darling said “if Gordon is listening to this” before remarking that he still felt a huge amount of “residual loyalty” to him. It is not news that the Brown government was dysfunctional. But it was striking that Darling did not dissent when Marr suggested that under Brown, Labour had – collectively – not been fit to govern. In the serialisation of the book in The Sunday Times, the detail that stands out to me is that Darling and David Miliband met

Monday

Fraser Nelson

Shaking our faith in money

Addictive though the hacking inquiry is, the average Brit is probably more worried about the slow decimation of his spending power at a time when salaries are flat. Against this backdrop, the price of gold today has broken $1,600 an ounce.  With inflation and the Fed’s printing presses whirring, faith in paper money is taking a knock – and this is reflected in the price of gold.  Fears of a debt crisis in Europe add to it too, with a disaster scenario all too easy to imagine. Over the last decade, the West blew a bubble fuelled by low interest rates and debt-financed consumption. The bubble burst. Solution: even lower

Thursday

James Forsyth

A nation of shareholders?

The great sleeper issue in British politics at the moment is what to do with the state owned bank shares. The money that could be generated by a sale of these bank shares is massive. The state’s stake in RBS is bigger than all the privatizations of the 1980s combined. Nick Clegg’s proposal (£) that everyone in the country be given shares in the banks is one option. But I suspect that would overly depress the value of the shares and would reduce the amount of money that the government would have in its pre-election war-chest. A more likely option is still a scheme where these shares are sold at

Anne Dawson

Why Belfast is ablaze

I live three miles away from where the rioting was happening in East Belfast last night, and heard the helicopters whirring overhead. It was the kind of sound that anyone living in the city hoped never to hear again. As a child, I’d lie in bed and hear bombs and sirens and helicopters — and we had all hoped that dark chapter had been closed. A tipping point of violence has now been reached. A press photographer has been shot, another given a fractured skull after a second night of riots. And in the aftermath, the blame game cacophony begins: Who started it? It was them. No it was them

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

Miliband and the past

Labour’s simmering resentments and self-doubts have been boiling over recently — and today is no different. Compare and contrast The Sun’s interview with Tony Blair with Andrew Grice’s article on Ed Balls in the Independent. For Blair, Labour ought to be claiming more credit for their preparatory role in some of the coalition’s reforms, such as the Academies programme. For Balls, they ought instead to be dodging blame for the state of the public finances. As Grice reports, “Ed Balls has rejected demands from allies of Ed Miliband that he admit Labour spent too much when they were in power.” From the rest of the piece, the shadow chancellor’s position

Peter Hoskin

Osborne comes to a decision on the banks — but the story doesn’t end there

In his speech to Mansion House last year, George Osborne asked a question of his frosted and cumberbunded audience: “Should we restrict or split the activities of banks?” In his speech tonight, he looks set to deliver an answer of his own. As Robert Peston reports, the Chancellor is to announce that the investment and retail arms of banks will be ringfenced off from each other, so that the dice rolls of the Masters of the Universe cannot tumble across everyday savers’ cash. This does not mean a complete, Glass-Steagall-style separation between the two halves. But, rather, it follows the recommendations of the interim report of the Vickers Commision: banks

Saturday

David Blackburn

Ed Balls opens a new front in the same old way

There are plenty of pressing issues at the moment, but two in particular stand out: the cost of living and youth unemployment. Ed Balls lost no time in latching onto the first issue. On becoming shadow chancellor, he immediately attacked the government’s VAT rise and benefits changes, which he judged to be the main contributors to rising inflation. It has been a  successful tactic, sustained by rising inflation and determined political pressure. Now Balls seems to be turning his full gaze at youth unemployment. In article for the News of the World, Balls launches his campaign to save “Britain Lost Talent”. At the root of this is a plan to

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

Stop Gordon Brown

Gordon Brown’s friends have launched a shameless effort to compel the government into nominating him for the IMF post. The government would be mad if they did. Mad. This is not about petty score-settling, as yesterday’s Evening Standard would have it. This is about qualifications to lead, and the former Prime Minister, despite his intellect, does not have those skills. He led the country to ruin and remains in denial about it: he saved the world, don’t cha know. The UK should be smarter about using talent from across the House, but there are limits. And it is a bit rich for the ex-PM’s friends to argue that David Cameron

Monday

Ed Howker

Alan Greenspan doesn’t exist

Five years have passed since Alan Greenspan stepped down from the most influential banking job in the world. (Now that’s how to leave at the right time.) Described in books, interviews and profiles too numerous to mention as ‘the most powerful regulator/person on earth’, he served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve for 19 years. For reasons of sheer longevity, perhaps Greenspan deserves to be called the architect of the modern global economy more than any of his elected contemporaries. So it’s not insignificant that, by the accounts of his friends back in 1950s New York, Greenspan was something of a fruit-loop as you will discover tonight if you watch

Friday

Fraser Nelson

How the banks were framed

A week that started with the Vickers review on banking has closed without another national explosion of banker-bashing. Thank God. Beating up on the banks has lasted almost three years now, and it’s blinding us to the real causes of the financial crisis. The banks are the perfect alibi: blaming them gets everyone off the hook. How, asks Gordon Brown, was a mere Prime Minister to know that banks were doing such fiendishly complicated things? How, asks George Osborne, was an opposition expected to detect what the government could not? How, asks Mervyn King, was the Bank of England governor supposed to know that these bankers had been so wicked?