Economy

If you were looking for a metaphor for the UK economy in 2023, you could do a lot worse than picturing a car that is running on the last vapours in the petrol tank. Its non-financial export industries are a mirage – plants which assemble components imported from elsewhere in the world, together with luxury goods which are vulnerable to the first whiff of a global recession.

So once again, it is ordinary working people – through increased housing costs, depressed wages, and unemployment – who get to pick up the tab – just like they did after 2008 – while the fat cats in the corporations hoover up the remaining assets...

We have entered a death spiral in which oil prices can no longer increase to a point which makes further investment in production viable but nor can prices fall to a level at which a new round of economic growth can begin.

Where 2021 was all about demand-pull, 2023 and 2024 are likely to be about demand-push, as consumer spending crashes, causing the discretionary side of the economy to collapse.

After decades of experience proving that economists are wrong and that central bankers are the wrongest of all, how seriously should we take the latest IMF claims that the UK economy will avoid a recession?

For the internet providers, the gathering loss of corporate and government broadband contracts is likely to be as big a hit as the loss of millions of household consumers, since historically, these have been prepared to pay higher business rates for their internet connection.

The real risk though, is that we are on the verge of a new stagflationary era – which rising interest rates have accelerated – in which the cost of energy-dependent essentials remains high even as the prices of discretionary goods and services deflate.

For more than a century, economists have speculated about what would happen when world oil production reached a peak.  The consensus view which has won out thus far is that the oil price would just keep increasing.  Indeed, there would not be a single peak of oil production, because each …

Today, “playing out” is recognised by psychologists as one of the means by which children come to terms with traumatic events.  But the dark events themselves become lost in the mists of time, removing the trauma from the echoes they leave behind for our delicate, civilised ears.  Consider children’s nursery …

The technocrats at the Bank of England have come in for more criticism as a result of Chief Economist Huw Pill’s remarks during an American podcast.  As Michael Race and Vishala Sri-Pathma at the BBC report, the former Goldman Sachs banker told listeners that: “Somehow in the UK, someone needs …