UK out of recession?

If it was government propaganda they'd have released the information closer to the election.

Looks like we weathered the economic storm :) Fantastic! I was never even out of work -- all I noticed was my mortgage becoming incredibly cheap!

That was awesome. And now another 10 years of BOOOOOOM! Life is good.
 
0.1% may be an small growth, but it is not insignificant.

The standard definition of a recession is a decline in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for two or more consecutive quarters. Thus any growth is technically the end of a recession.

However, this isn't an economically desirable definition because it ignores several variables.

The Business Cycle Dating Committee at the NBER has a more realistic view, which determines the amount of business activity in the economy by looking at things like employment, industrial production, real income and wholesale-retail sales.

A recession is then defined as the time when business activity has reached its peak and starts to fall until the time when business activity bottoms out. What follows is known as the expansionary period, until a time when business activity is at a large growth rate.

Obviously the standard definition favours Labour at a time when they need every point they can get for an election, so it stands to reason they would utilise the more simple one.

Convenient time to announce this with an impending election… Just to quote something I heard not too long ago –

‘writers use lies to tell the truth’ and ‘politicians use lies to cover the truth’.

Astounds me sometimes – we might or might not be out of recession. The sceptic in me just feels this is sugar coating…..

We've scrapped out of recession long after everyone else, and barely.

Go Brown?


I'm sorry but how can you be talking about the rescission when malc has just performed a miracle?


I'm sure these people just read the title and not the thread :p
 
So now technically we can't be in recession until another 2-3 quarters of negative growth, even if the last quarter was just a christmas holiday blip.
 
So now technically we can't be in recession until another 2-3 quarters of negative growth, even if the last quarter was just a christmas holiday blip.

Indeed we can't, at least not by the technical definition, unless this growth figure is revised on the way (which does happen, this is just the preliminary figure.
 
This all an electioneering smokescreen of useless statistics. Ordinary people don't care if there is a 0.1% growth in the economy for a 3 month period. The most important statistic that should matter is the number of people unemployed (including those who have taken low paid temporary work).
 
'Long after' seems a little harsh, as it's measured quarterly and we are one quarter late - if we didn't come out of recession at the same time it couldn't have been any earlier :p
 
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