UK News

from MacroScope:

UK GDP: Should have gone to Specsavers?

twice as fast as expected in the second quarter of this year propelled by a sharp pick-up in services and the biggest rise in construction in almost 50 years.

Markets are getting used to volatile swings in economic data since the financial crisis set in three years ago. But UK GDP figures for Q2 were so eye-poppingly strong they caused confusion on trading floors.   

 

"Should have gone to Specsavers??" wrote Philip Shaw, chief economist at Investec, referring to British television commercials lampooning myopic citizens who desperately need a new pair of corrective lenses.

 

"Perhaps critics will suggest that the ONS has got it wrong again, but traders' initial suggestions, calling into question the accuracy of the newswire reports -- and this author's eyesight -- proved to be misplaced," wrote Shaw.

 

The 1.1 percent quarterly growth the Office for National Statistics reported for Q2 was nearly double the 0.6 percent Reuters consensus forecast and blew out the highest forecast polled, 0.8 percent, by a significant margin. The fact it came a half hour after news the German Ifo index saw its biggest one month surge since reunification in 1990 made it all the more shocking.

from MacroScope:

Slowing growth, MPC splits? That’s so 2008

Sixties nostalgia was all the rage in the late 90s, and towards the end of the last decade we looked back only 20 years or so for a massive 80s revival in electronic pop and fashion.

With the 2010s in full flow, the current vogue of choice derives from just two years ago – at least among those noted trendsetters, economists.

from MacroScope:

It’s all Germany’s fault

It is fairly commonplace at the moment for U.S. and UK financial analysts -- what continental Europeans call the Anglo-Saxons -- to predict the collapse of the euro zone,  a project they were mostly sceptical about in the first place.  MacroScope touched on this on two occasions in March.

The latest foray into this area comes from Alan Brown,  global chief  investment officer at the large UK fund firm  Schroders. But he does it with twist,  blaming what he sees as the eventual  collapse of the euro zone not on the structure itself nor  on the profligacy of peripheral economies, but on Germany's response to the crisis.

from The Great Debate UK:

Heather Rogers on fixing “Green Gone Wrong”

How can human production be transformed and harnessed to save the planet? Can the market economy really help solve the environmental crisis?

Author Heather Rogers argues in a new book that current efforts to green the planet need to be reconsidered.