A report due out soon by the Item Club seems destined to confirm what most of us already know, Britain is in a recession.
The report is set to state that Britain faces the biggest fall in output since the Great Depression; they put the fall in investment at 15%. Peter Spencer, Item’s chief economist also states that the fall is likely to continue with another 2.7% drop over the course of this year.
He says “The time for caution is past. It looks a frighteningly long way down to the recessionary rocks below. All of the economic statistics are in free fall.”
He may be a gloom merchant but at least he has an interesting turn of phrase, he also has some advice for the government. According to him the government ought to buy toxic assets from the banks and quickly.
He is not the only one to who seems to want to fill us with an impending sense of doom. Howard Archer of the forecasting group Global Insight has had this to say this week
“We are going into recession big time. You could say we are going into recession in style”
As I can’t bear to leave you totally in the doldrums I will point out that we may be at least able to dress in style on our trip to the recessionary rocks. The recent tumble in inflation has definitely led to a cooling in consumer prices on goods such as clothes and audio products, according to a report released on Tuesday.
It may be just as well as it seems we may have to put on another layer to afford the rise in gas and electricity prices which rose sharply in the twelve months to November 2008.
