Oh I love it. Misery Index at highest since Black Wednesday

Graham_Devon

My kind of index!

If you want to know why the British economy is so depressed, you need to look no further than the so-called Misery Index. This is what you get when you add together the unemployment rate and the inflation rate, and after today's announcement of a big rise in the cost of living in September the Misery Index is at its highest level since the immediate aftermath of Black Wednesday in 1992.

Put simply, the economy is suffering from a mild but nasty dose of stagflation, the disease that afflicted Britain at various times from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s. Things are nowhere near as bad as they were in 1975, when an inflation rate in excess of 25% sent the Misery Index above 30, but there has been a marked deterioration over the past 12 months.

The relationship between high inflation and the sluggishness of activity is easy to understand. Prices are up by 5.2% over the past 12 months according to the consumer prices index and by 5.6% using the retail prices index, which is the benchmark for most pay deals. Wages are rising much less rapidly, by 1.8% over the past year excluding bonus payments. The gap between prices and earnings – almost 4 percentage points if the RPI is used as the measure of inflation – shows that real incomes have shrunk over the past year at the fastest rate since the early 1980s.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/economics-blog/2011/oct/18/inflation-misery-index-black-wednesday

Will be keeping my eyes on this misery index. It's my new favourite graph thingymewotsit! And no, Hamish, you can't log in somewhere and vote it up.

Loughton_Monkey

Yes, but look at the 5.2% rise in benefits. No misery for the 'poor' since they are inflation-proof. Just the pooor honest workers who need to be pig-sick!

Gin & Tonics (and another child) all round!

Pimperne1

Graham_Devon wrote: »

My kind of index!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/economics-blog/2011/oct/18/inflation-misery-index-black-wednesday

Will be keeping my eyes on this misery index. It's my new favourite graph thingymewotsit! And no, Hamish, you can't log in somewhere and vote it up.

All we need now is for the Halifax, Nationwide and LR to be up and that'll be the full set.

Graham_Devon

Pimperne1 wrote: »

All we need now is for the Halifax, Nationwide and LR to be up and that'll be the full set.

Wot?

House prices, house prices, house prices....that's all we get.

S'not about house prices. Did you know theres more to the economy? Shocker, I know!

This is about misery. And lots of it.

Blacklight

Graham_Devon wrote: »

Wot?

House prices, house prices, house prices....that's all we get.

S'not about house prices. Did you know theres more to the economy? Shocker, I know!

This is about misery. And lots of it.

Bookmarked so you eat your words next month. I've also put a note in my diary to wheel this out when VAT drops out of the calculation in January.

Graham_Devon

Blacklight wrote: »

Bookmarked so you eat your words next month. I've also put a note in my diary to wheel this out when VAT drops out of the calculation in January.

Again...wot?

Feel free, write a note in your diary too. Even better, do it on the computer and get it to remind you that you need to have a pop at someone on the internet. Not sure what your popping about, but I'm sure you do!

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

Graham_Devon wrote: »

Will be keeping my eyes on this misery index..

Misery index today = 13.1

Misery index in 1975 = 30

Long way to go before we have it anywhere near as bad as previous generations then.:)

Blacklight

Graham_Devon wrote: »

Again...wot?

Feel free, write a note in your diary too. Even better, do it on the computer and get it to remind you that you need to have a pop at someone on the internet. Not sure what your popping about, but I'm sure you do!

Oh alright Graham, if you don't want cheering up and prefer to wallow in your own misery HPC is that way --->

Graham_Devon

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

Misery index today = 13.1

Misery index in 1975 = 30

Long way to go before we have it anywhere near as bad as previous generations then.:)

That may be so. But we are twice as miserable today as September 2004 don't you know.

vivatifosi

That's really strange. On last night's University Challenge, one of the questions was (to paraphrase Paxo) "what two measures make up the misery index"? And lo, here it is being talked about.

So does this mean

a) Dev is a secret University Challenge viewer and having been inspired by the question went away to look it up and found this cunningly timed article.
b) The journo from the from the Grauniad was inspired by the UC question they wrote a whole article about it, which then Dev discovered.
c) I should get a life and stop watching University Challenge and hanging out on here. The former makes me a nerd, the latter makes me paranoid and start looking for conspiracy theories.

Really2

vivatifosi wrote: »

That's really strange. On last night's University Challenge, one of the questions was (to paraphrase Paxo) "what two measures make up the misery index"? And lo, here it is being talked about.

So does this mean

a) Dev is a secret University Challenge viewer and having been inspired by the question went away to look it up and found this cunningly timed article.
b) The journo from the from the Grauniad was inspired by the UC question they wrote a whole article about it, which then Dev discovered.
c) I should get a life and stop watching University Challenge and hanging out on here. The former makes me a nerd, the latter makes me paranoid and start looking for conspiracy theories.

Also, if you like (or love) the misery index, does that not make it a paradox?