Recession
rick_chasey
Posts: 65,287 Lives Here
Usually we only hear about being in recession a month or two after it happens.
"The UK economy shrunk 0.2% over the past month, meaning it is in recession".
I like to guess what the growth figures will be by spuriously speculating on the basis of the mood of people at work, and the mood of the people I know about their work.
Anyone think the economy is in recession right now?
I know I do. My clients, clients of friends, they're all stalling about giving work. I've been hearing of redundancies for pretty good people (outside of the City).
So, I recon it's shrunk by nearer 0.5%.
"The UK economy shrunk 0.2% over the past month, meaning it is in recession".
I like to guess what the growth figures will be by spuriously speculating on the basis of the mood of people at work, and the mood of the people I know about their work.
Anyone think the economy is in recession right now?
I know I do. My clients, clients of friends, they're all stalling about giving work. I've been hearing of redundancies for pretty good people (outside of the City).
So, I recon it's shrunk by nearer 0.5%.
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It's quite depressing, especially being the wrong side of 50 and realising that you are going to be lucky to find another job.
So yes, we are still in a recession. and we haven't seen the worst yet.
I thought the UK has been growing, albeit anaemically for the past 12 months?
Now Cable is trying to lower expectations and prepare public opinion for the worst in the hope of minimising the inevitable panic that will come...
We had 10 years of 'growth' on the back of a crazy debt bubble. This inevitably crashed, but rather than letting those that caused the problems and took the risks take the major pain, the govt decided to transfer most of the debt onto the general public. Then they added further debt under the guise of 'stimulus', which gave the illusion of growth for a short period, but really just kicked the can down the road. Printing money does much the same thing: transfer the pain and kick the can.
Now, or very soon we have to face up to the debt bubble and whatever way you slice it up, the overall standard of living has to fall.
So whether or not we're in recession now or later, it will come. Growth can stop this, but it needs to be real growth. By that, I mean production, not a further extension of the debt bubble ... I really can't see where that will come from??
...For the people who got us in to this mess, not those who never saw this so-called 'prosperity'
On the other hand when going on a night out at weekends it used to be at least half hour wait for a taxi home where as now if you call a cab it’s available immediately and the driver will tell you how little the business there is, dire is a word that is used a lot. It’s things like that which they say are a good measure isn’t it, asking hairdressers what the demand for expensive cuts is like for example. Also the number of leaflets through my door from odd-job men, window cleaners etc. certainly getting a lot more of those.
We do seem to be in this cycle of gloom, I said on another thread recently that there are people with money but aren’t spending as the message is constantly bad and everyone should save, which of course means you end up in recession anyway.
Any spurious predictions for what the growth (or lack of) will be when it's next announced?
But we're in this mess because we spent more than we were earning.
Savings are always seen as bad in a bizarre 'Keynesian' world, but savings are good as the money is then available for someone else to invest.
The recession is seen as a lack of confidence in spending, but really it's just the inevitable end of a ponzi debt bubble. Spending doesn't solve this. Printing money and throwing it at people to spend, just changes the balance of things, but doesn't improve the overall economy. The only real way to improve things in by producing more things or offering more services that people want to buy ... which then raises the standard of living.
Don't really agree with any of those points.
- A country can survive producing services alone as long as they can buy the other stuff from countries that in return want to buy the services.
- We will never run out of things we can do. We're so efficient at the basics that we need very few farmers or miners etc, but there's endless scope for improving our standard of living (health, energy, education, housing, entertainment....)
- Japan suffered as they tried to hard to contain the crash. They printed money, bailed out banks, home owner etc and have ended up with zombie banks and a lost generation.
The cuts in public service jobs hasn't kicked in yet and when you look at the potential disaster which is the eurozone and the amount of money our banks/financial institutions have tied up in that; plus the state of the U.S. economy I can't help but think the world could be on the edge of a global depression never mind recession.
Not being a financial wiz kid I don't really know but the signs don't look very good.
The above post may contain traces of sarcasm or/and bullsh*t.
It grew over the last two quarters. (just).
These small growth figures (either way) are a bit meaningless when we're running such a large deficit.
If you get 0.1% GDP growth, but the government is borrowing and spending 10% of GDP, then is it really growth.
Even worse is if the government debt is wasted in either continuing to employ unproductive people or incomplete/unwanted projects. The govt deficit is really just stealing GDP from the future. Fine if you leave the future with something that will increase their productivity (a useful bridge for example), but bad if they just have the debt and some empty fire control centres.
I think the economic system of neoliberalism we have been living with over the past 40 years has really messed up. Time will tell just how much...
Gov't spending's a componant of GDP though, so it's wrong to discount that.
After all, the money that we earn but don't get, (i.e. taxed money) is still spent - just not by us.
My experience and the experiences of my friends/family etc is all B2B.
Food and energy prices rising as they are relative to the freeze in wages is really causing people to cut back.
Sure, for normal taxation/spending, but the deficit is not raised through taxes. It's borrowed against the future. If they were clever enough, the govt could use surplus/deficit to keep growth ever constant. With the current deficit so high, the govt are artificially creating growth ..... but really just adding to the debt ponzi in an attempt to kick the can a little further down the road.
-15.4%
We're talking UK, not the wild east Europe :P
(How's the newly wed wife?)
Inflation is a much bigger problem than they make out. In canada they tell us 4% but I reckon it's likely double that at least.
We do all right. I save my company more than they pay me (industrial engineering), so they like me around and the wife is doing well in her pursuits. My sister in law must be finding it tough on her salary though.
It would be great for me if the government chucked a load of money into road building, social housing etc. which would bring work into my sector but I still think that the current policy of cuts has to be implemented first.
By the way, isn't the official definition of a recession to be two consecutive quarters of negative growth? That is great for a government as one small patch of tiny growth starts the cycle again.
Unfortunetly they only truthful statement that came out of Gordon Brown's government was the note which Liam Byrne left at the treasury "There's no money left".
The IMF doesnt, which has long been Gideon's crutch for these cuts...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011 ... ession-imf
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14985709
Doing a job for which she's overqualified, working for a manager who is incompetent. :evil: