MacroScope

Even if they can’t agree how much Britain’s Help to Buy mortgage guarantee scheme will boost the housing market, analysts in the latest Reuters poll are united by an understanding of its dangers.

The government’s Help to Buy programme, unveiled in its March budget, is designed to boost mortgage lending and help buyers with small deposits get on the property ladder.

The poll predicts Britain’s house prices will rise at their fastest pace in four years in 2013, and data from Hometrack show London property was snapped up in April more quickly than at any time since October 2007 – adding to concerns Help to Buy might start a new house price bubble.

Analysts are largely split into two camps. On the one side, there are those who think Help to Buy will provide just a modest uptick in housing market activity. But even so, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the wisdom of the programme is sound:

The Help To Buy mortgage guarantee scheme may well give the market more of a boost from 2014. While measures to support the market are welcome, the scheme will encourage households to leverage up.

* Updated to show Scotland’s composite PMI has bettered the UK equivalent for seven straight months now, after Monday’s data.

For the first time in a long while, Scotland’s economic performance has caught up with the UK average– and there is at least some evidence to suggest it’s doing slightly better than the British baseline.

In general, the Scottish economy has come second-best behind the poor UK average, at least since the full onslaught of the global financial crisis hit in September 2008 with the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

Mark these words. Not only is Britain going to avoid a triple-dip recession, but the economy won’t shrink again as far as the eye can see.

If that sounds ridiculously optimistic, don’t tell the more than 30 economists polled by Reuters last week, none of whom predict even a single quarter of economic decline from here on.

Even the Bank of England, not exactly famous these days for its accuracy in economic forecasting, has said for a long time that a quarter or two of contraction here and there is to be expected. That was underlined by Wednesday’s unexpected news some policymakers voted for more bond purchases this month.

Britain’s economy shrank an estimated 0.3 percent at the end of 2012 and every major media outlet says it points to a big risk of a triple-dip recession.

And equally predictably, some economists have already pointed out it’s a preliminary report, so maybe the economy isn’t as weak as the stats show. Negative figures have been revised away in the past.

While both points may well be true, they really amount to a squabble over whether your football team is going to go 4-0 down or 5-0 down. As Markit Economics pointed out, Friday’s figures mean that UK GDP remains some 3.2 percent lower than the peak of Q1 2008.

The Bank of England is finally catching a break. With Britain’s economy officially in recession, the BoE had been constrained from further monetary easing by a stubbornly high inflation rate. But as the global economy stumbles and Europe’s crisis rages unabated, UK price pressures may be giving way.

Barclays economist Chris Crowe argues:

We expect the MPC to announce an additional £50bn in QE at the July policy meeting.

CPI inflation fell to 2.8% y/y in May (Barclays 3.1%, consensus 3.0%) from 3.0% in April. Meanwhile, RPI inflation declined to 3.1% y/y (Barclays and consensus 3.3%), from 3.5%. With near-term inflationary pressures easing, the case for additional QE in response to faltering confidence is stronger.

Britons have a reputation for endless talk about the weather, and the UK’s Office for National Statistics is no different.

We’ve already noted how the ONS cited the effect of the royal wedding and surrounding bank holidays as one reason why the economy only managed growth of 0.2 percent quarter-on-quarter between March and June.

While that’s taken up most of the talk, the ONS also pointed to the “record warm weather in April” as another “special event” that dented economic growth.

This time it was the royal wedding. When the economy shrank unexpectedly late last year, it was the bad weather. If Britain’s economy again struggles to generate growth in the current quarter, perhaps it will be blamed on the new series of ‘The Apprentice’.

"Thanks for nothing!"

Britain’s economy grew 0.2 percent quarter-on-quarter between March and June, exactly in-line with the Reuters poll consensus. Perhaps the most interesting part of the GDP release statement was the Office for National Statistics’ claim that without special factors, including the royal wedding, growth could have hit 0.7 percent.

That would have taken the GDP index at market prices back above 100 points – its 2006 base level – for the first time since the recession, but as it happened, it fell just short, at 99.8.

Could British economic growth figures for the second quarter mark another shocker for bank economists?

After the 0.5 percent contraction in the fourth quarter of last year that no-one foresaw, we remarked that economists seemed loath to spoil the party by predicting a negative figure.

Although some economic data did hint that a slight downturn was on the cards, no-one then was willing to stick their neck out and predict a contraction. In the end, the 0.5 percent quarter-on-quarter decline was a whole percentage point off the consensus for a 0.5 percent expansion.

The outlook for the UK housing market has darkened again. The usually optimistic bunch of property market watchers polled by Reuters, who have tended to predict ever-rising property prices no matter what the season or financial climate, now say the market will move sideways for the next two years.

They say that in the next few months, the small double-dip in prices that has begun will continue. Modest gains predicted less than three months ago for this year and next essentially have been wiped away.

No one should be surprised by this.  It smacks of an awakening to reality more than a slight change to a few variables in the statistical model. What’s perhaps most striking about these new poll results is that economists think houses are even more overvalued now than they were in July even after a few straight months of falls.

Bank of England Governor Mervyn King was on good form when he addressed the Royal Society – Britain’s oldest scientific discussion club – on the vexing issue of communicating complex forecasts to the great unwashed.

Aside from his usual moan about the media’s desire to reduce the BoE’s beautiful but baffling ‘fan charts’ of inflation forecasts to one or two numbers, he made a rare and welcome admission that in past years the central bank had not done as well as it could have to flag up the risk that a financial crisis was about to happen.

The BoE’s financial stability reports – like those from many other central banks – sometimes sounded as if they were crying wolf in the years running up to the credit crunch by warning of pretty much every risk to markets short of Martian invasion.