Officially in recession

wotsthat

Graham_Devon wrote: »

Well, was pretty obvious, wasn't it. Doesn't take a genius, as we can now see!

+/- zero was clearly where we were going to end up.

I've skimmed through the ONS release and it's difficult to find any positive news. There's clearly no pressure for increasing bank rates to prevent the economy overheating anytime soon.

Labour will obviously be delighted as they'll be able to throw the word 'recession' about. + 0.1% would have been better as, even though the effect is the same, the word recession might force the government into ill thought out knee jerk reactions.

They do need to have a hard think about where growth is going to come from.

FTBFun

simonSE15 wrote: »

Must be bad for house price sentiment.

Will this be the beginning of the London crash?

Are the two linked?

I'd think a reduction in construction won't be doing too much to assist with the pressures on supply.

MonkeyMad

Error in GDP is probably at least 0.5% (I'm making it up mid) so unless the economy is contracting or expanding to a noticeable extend you might as just regard these figures as saying we don't know what the answer is. The fact the we might have a technical recession(or not) of such small magnitude is only of interest to those with an axe to grind.

SecondLegDownIsTheBigOne

We have been in recession since the crash. We've just had the figures fiddled with QE.

IronWolf

Recession or not, we can't know for certain given the error around the figures, but the UK economy has still never recovered from the last recession.

To think that this is one of the worst economic periods ever really shows that it hasn't been as bad as it could have been for regular people. Unemployment is still relatively low considered the severity of this downturn.

Generali

It's worth remembering that construction is down 3% yet figures for March are not included in this GDP estimate, they are instead 'guestimated' from Jan and Feb's figures.

spadoosh

Generali wrote: »

It's worth remembering that construction is down 3% yet figures for March are not included in this GDP estimate, they are instead 'guestimated' from Jan and Feb's figures.

Yes but i think they need something like 14% growth YoY or 40% growth MoM (increase from feb) to break even. Incredibly ambitious to think its attainable. However you never know, maybe the mention of recession has put me in a pessimistic mood.

gagahouse

Wow, they've managed to achieve 2 quarters of contraction while expanding the trade gap. That takes some doing for the UK economy, brings a whole new meaning to 're-balancing'.

The_White_Horse

the good news is the increase in council workers on £100k a year is up 13% since last year. Recession? What recession????

wymondham

So as construction is mentioned to have taken a knock in this can we then look forward to more bizarre schemes for private developers to build homes funded by the tax payer?