Dear Chief Secretary to the Treasury,
I'm afraid to tell you there's no money left.
Signed, Liam Byrne

(Outgoing Labour Chief Secretary to the Treasury. May 2010)
.
.

Saturday 27 February 2010

Worse than they thought? - In pictures.

Eh?

ONS got the numbers wrong?

Edmund Conway, Economics Editor of the Telegraph writes
it wasn’t merely the latest quarter worth of data that the ONS revised today – it also went back through a whole range of its statistics, and discovered that the recession was in fact significantly deeper than it previously thought.

So although in Q4 Britain ended up producing more or less the same amount of cash (actually £133m less, as I’ve pointed out), it produced even less than was previously thought in the preceding quarters. So, in comparison, the jump between Q3 and Q4 works out at 0.3pc rather than 0.1pc.
Read the whole article and see the original graph here



..........

And separately, these charts and graphs are courtesy of a Coffee House piece discussing an interview with Mr Brown. It's probably silly to show them on their own, but they do make a point.

t really is worth reading the whole piece, as well as the comments beneath it.

This first chart is alongside an excuse that "... Every country has had a build up of debt as result of the recession"


This next one, explained by the title, alongside one of Mr Brown's 'I'll ask myself a question and then answer it ...' moments - "... did we run too high a level of debt prior to the crisis? The answer is that we ran one of the lowest debt levels of any of the G7 countries."


And a statement that " ... there are two and a half million more people in work than in 1997."
Pity that so few of them are British born.


One of the comments below the article points out that
"A more powerful way of representing the data in Fraser's table would be to show the percentage increase in the debt figure over 4 years:

Ireland 250%
UK 102%
Spain 85%
France 42%
Portugal 39%
Euro Area 36%
Greece 33%
Germany 27%
Italy 17%

This is when the UK figures begin to look SCARY!!!"
....

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