Tweet If the UK economy has contracted in the fourth quarter of 2012 when the once-only Olympic surge falls away and then again in the first quarter of the new year, then by the conventional definition Britain will have suffered an unprecedented triple-dip recession. It is likely then that Osborne’s treasured triple-A credit status will [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Growth’
Does anybody know where the long-term growth is to come from?
Oct 28th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.Tweet If the 1% growth in the third quarter is a blip (caused by a once-in-a-lifetime Olympics surge plus a catch-up on deferred production from the previous quarter), where is genuinely sustainable growth going to come from? This is a much more worrying question than whether the double-dip has really ended. The usual sustainable growth [...]
‘The worst of recession is over’? That will come back to haunt Cameron
Oct 27th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.Tweet Where did we hear it before? ‘I detect the green shoots of growth’ (Norman Lamont as the economy plunged again) and ‘We’ve ended boom and bust’ (Gordon Brown just before the biggest financial crash for a century). Equally Cameron’s ‘worst of the recession is over’ is a foolish hostage to fortune which he will [...]
Hollande to present austerity treaty gift wrapped to French Parliament
Jun 30th, 2012 by Tom Gill.Tweet (In the Radical Press – Humanité) It’s done. François Hollande announced Friday afternoon that he would submit the fiscal pact (Treaty on the stability, coordination and governance in the Economic and Monetary Union – TSCG) to be ratified by the French Parliament. During his Presidential campaign he had promised to renegotiate it and would [...]
Merkel isolated as preacher of reactionary austerity
May 19th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.Tweet It is almost incredible that faced with the very real likelihood of a slide into world slump, as Obama is now warning, Merkel continues to parrot the reactionary monetarist mantra that “there can be no growth through borrowing”. There can certainly be no growth through prolonged austerity, though she didn’t admit that. Bookmarks Hide [...]
Three speeds In Europe, all slower
May 17th, 2012 by Michael Burke.Tweet The latest publication of the GDP data for the EU shows three distinct trends but one unifying theme – slower growth. In an important but dwindling group are those economies which are still expanding, led by Germany where GDP grew by 0.5% in the first quarter of 2012. In a larger group are those [...]
As Hollande meets Merkel, when will Left in UK take on monetarists?
May 14th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.Tweet It is almost incredible that after failure upon failure the monetarists have still not yet been run out of town. Even after the decisive anti-austerity presidential election in France a week ago, the ejection of all austerity-accommodating parties in Greece, and now the drubbing of the German Conservatives in North-Rhine Westphalia, it seems the [...]
Politics in wonderland: not too many enthralled
May 9th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.Tweet You couldn’t invent it. There’s really only one issue in Britain today that ultimately matters: how to get growth. All the political parties recognise that, indeed proclaim it, but none of them put forward the policies that will actually deliver it. The Queen’s Speech is an irrelevance, with a whopping big black hole in [...]
UK stagnation is home grown & down to government
Oct 11th, 2011 by Michael Burke.Tweet George Osborne and other Tories as well as their supporters in the media are now promoting the idea that the stagnation of the British economy is a function of the turmoil in the Eurozone economy and financial markets. The main channel for economic weakness in the Eurozone to be expressed in British economic activity [...]
Osborne in Wonderland
Oct 4th, 2011 by Michael Meacher.Tweet Contrary to Osborne’s claims, the central economic problem in Britain today is not indebtedness, it is lack of demand. If Osborne’s speech yesterday was the clothing by which he presents his future policy over the next year, it would scarcely cover his nakedness. There is nothing there that deals remotely adequately with the only [...]
