Here’s the BBC’s take on the economy:
We’ve got some really good growth….but it’s based on Services….which means ‘consumer spending’ the BBC tells us…which, as consumers have no money (cost of living crisis!) and no savings, must be funded by borrowing…which is unsustainable…therefore the recovery is built on sand….it’s the wrong sort of growth!
Trouble is…’Services’ doesn’t just consist of Retail…Services are an industry in their own right…We were told they don’t produce anything today by a BBC ‘expert’ journo….which of course is bollocks….what would you call software (Microsoft), art, music, media, education, mechanics, designers, architects….even journalists? They all produce a product….and apart from that, ‘Services’ must service something…presumably at the request of somebody who needs them…..like ‘Industry’ which produces the physical products….which might suggest those industries are also picking up.
And as for ‘Retail’…well it has to sell something…therefore it has to have a product…one made in a factory, designed by someone, transported by a man in a lorry, put on the shelves by shop staff…and as for the money to buy it…who says it comes from borrowing?…where is the BBC’s proof? So far it seems just a statement of ‘fact’ based purely on wishful thinking (on Mickey Clark’s part) and speculation.
Never mind that retail isn’t booming to any great extent….we heard that people are still being very careful with their money and doing their research for the best prices before buying…doesn’t sound like an irresponsible rush to bankruptcy does it?
Curiously the BBC (and Labour) ignore the businesses that say, and have been saying for a longtime now, that in fact they are doing very well thankyou and they think the future looks bright.
Phone in after phone in on the BBC businesses say they are doing well….I haven’t heard a negative one yet.
And what of that great employment puzzle that the BBC always raised to cast doubt on the ever rising employment figures (as well as dismissing them as part time, temporary, or low grade)? You know, the BBC says….it is just inexplicable that employment is going up in a such a terrible recession.
They did speculate momentarily that it could be that the economy was in fact doing much better than the figures suggested…but they laughed that off.
The answer they decided was that industry was unproductive, underperforming.
But that raises the question, yes employers might want to keep on skilled staff on lower wages (which of course means they are still productive…as costs go down), but why would they employ more if they were already so unproductive with underemployed staff?
The answer of course, if the BBC had cared to ask, is that many businesses were doing well and so not only kept on staff but employed more…and new businesses started up also employing more people.
Today we heard of a website design company that started up in 2009, right at the heart of the bust…..it initially employed 4 people…so that’s 4 to start with…it now employs 13.
How many more of these small companies stared up and succeeded…must be many out there providing those ‘mysterious’ jobs?
The BBC didn’t bother seeking out the answer because it didn’t suit the narrative that the employment figures, and the economic success that suggested was all smoke and mirrors about to collapse as Plan A and Austerity ‘kills the patient’ as Evan Davis (amongst others at the BBC) kept telling us it would.
What really amuses me is that Micky Clark on Wake Up To Money bangs on relentlessly that this is a recovery based on low interest rates and easy credit funding an unsustainable consumer boom and a housing bubble….which he tells us ‘is what led to the recession in the first place’….you can question his analysis of the present growth but he ain’t wrong about the cause of Labour’s ‘Great Recession’….and it wasn’t the fabled Cable’s ‘Casino Investment Banks’…it was retail banks (like RSB and Northern Rock) lending out too much money and doling out cheap mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them, here and in the US, who laid the foundations for the bust.
…the truth is out there then……but strange he never mentions who was responsible for all that cheap credit and slack regulation of the financial services.
I’m glad things appear to be picking up and I know the BBC like to put the dampeners on any good news that may be nothing to do with Labour but here comes the BUT. I believe that the deficit is going to be twice what it was when the coalition took over so the humongous mountain of debt is still there and a danger to us all. There are other debts I could bang on about as well but the point I am trying to get to is could this good news just be a drop in the ocean as to what is needed to get us out of the poo. I’m no fan of the BBC’s political leanings by the way.
The debt will be bigger, and will continue to grow, so long as there remains a deficit at all… But the deficit itself is coming down. OK, it is not coming down fast enough, but it is going in the right direction and as the economy grows and tax receipts increase from that increasing economic activity, the deficit should come down even faster. There will have to be a massive external economic shock, like another international banking crisis, for the deficit to double.
I wouldn’t be too concerned about the Labour party’s pathetic last ditch ‘people still don’t FEEL better off’ line. It is the last line they have. Let’s not forget that they car-crashed the economy and then promoted President Hollande’s Plan B – now in an even worse state than his private life.
Your website designer was in Derby, and was happy to moan on that he didn`t feel any richer despite starting out only in 2009.
His competitors made him nervous-fair enough.
But when the hapless beeboid asked that wrong question ( and have you taken on any new employees?)…he said -yes, he started with just four, and now he has thirteen staff.
By my mind a 225% increase in employment.
But he wasn`t ahppy with that…for all the competitors were doing the same in employment too.
Phone down-and off to slate the Tories again.
Desperate Doom mongs there at the BBC.
Private Fraser since Jonesy (in the form of Gordon Brown) nacked the economy, and was about to get the troops out.
No point listening to `em anymore, except for comedy-and can`t find that either!
I’m waiting for some eastern England University to provide a model simulation of how well-off we’d all have been if Labour had won the last election.
At least it would be somewhat better than having to listen to: “Growth Jim, but not as want it” diatribe from Labour.
There is a good chance that the deficit would be higher, nearer to 200Bn debt closing in on 2 trillion, unemployment a million higher and the UK government taxing everyone even more to pay hundreds of billions more to the international central and investment bankers in interest rates.
Labour bailed out the bankers whilst doubling the income tax of the poorest workers and had plans to pay the bankers hundreds of billions more to those bankers, and yet labour pretend to be the bash the banker party? they are the international bankers best friends, whilst actively hating and hurting the poor.
‘ Micky Clark on Wake Up To Money bangs on relentlessly that this is a recovery based on low interest rates and easy credit funding an unsustainable consumer boom and a housing bubble….which he tells us ‘is what led to the recession in the first place’
Funny, I don’t ever remember the BBC saying that – especially between 2008 and 2010. I thought, as the BBC kept informing us via its mouthpiece, G Brown, it was all about ‘the global recession which started in the US’.
Gordon Brown. Two chancellors for the price of one.
Pre-2008, the Iron Chancellor. The best chancellor for a century, with an OCD like attention to detail, working relentlessly, tweaking every part of the economy, creating the longest tax code in the world, creating 168 consecutive quarters of growth (which started under John Major’s government in 1992) ending boom and bust, creating marrying big-business, finance, banking and industry with compassionate benefits…
Then all of a sudden, 2008-onwards, nope, he had not touched the economy at all after all, nor tinkered, tweaked, messed, manipulated it, but had merely innocently overseen the maintenance of Thatcher’s big bang capitalism, until it exploded
Labour would have you believe that black is white.
The coalition recovery is built on sand………. What was labour’s boom and bust built on? Come on BBC we aren’t as stupid as you think.
Shit…..Bullshit to be specific
I watched some news at Lunchtime and they had a middle aged woman on (Blond hair, glasses) parroting that the its the Chinese and Brazilians getting rich out of the increase of the British economy.
In fact everything I have seen from the bBC on the subject is bad news. Even Ed Balls was given more than enough time in the house to tell the world that the British economy was….failing and then we wonder why people have so little faith, no matter what the Government (Backed by facts) say, the bBC will say otherwise and they get the chance to brainwash everybody 5 times a day.
The stat that seems not to be mentioned much is that the trade deficit is actually increasing, suggesting that consumption is increasing but that foreign markets are filling the manufacturing gap.
It also suggests that if wages are not rising and the cost of living not falling, then either people now have free money because old debts are now paid, or they are borrowing money again (or rather overspending on short term credit lines like credit cards and store/catalogue accounts).
So I think a note of caution is warranted, and its unrealistic to suggest that interest rates remain as low as they are for much longer. We need to make the cost of doing business in the UK lower, especially for manufacturers and even more so for export markets – it’s unrealistic to think that we can sustain a recovery on consumer spending without this.
‘….. then either people now have free money because old debts are now paid, or they are borrowing money again.’
Don’t forget the billions trousered from PPI claims. You bet the modern day, incontinent, ‘live for today’ Brit just went out and spent it, as he does with spurious motor insurance claims.
It isn’t just the BBC saying this though, Money Week are saying it too, and as far as I’m aware there’s no political axe to grind there.
The GDP figure has increased, but that’s one of the functions of the Tories continuing the mass immigration policies of Nu Liebour. They never ever quote the GDP per head which I expect is falling.
I fully believe that the BBC is wholly biased, but that doesn’t mean that everything they broadcast is automatically wrong or in support of Labour, and the problem we have is in sorting legitimate economic concerns, & truth, from blatant lies and mischievous political machinations.
The ‘house of cards’ recovery has been commented on in many other places, the BBC would be failing in their duty to inform if it wasn’t reported.
If we cry about every truth / opinion the BBC broadcasts because we don’t like the message, then we are also failing in our mission to point out bias and we lose credibility when we do find glaring bias, which happens every day !
http://moneyweek.com/bill-bonner-this-recovery-is-fake/
Last night’s news, and interview with workers in a curtain tape factory; usual breathless question to workers about are they feeling any better off. Perhaps they should have asked the workers if they were pleased that their job was more secure, or even if they own their own house and had they benefitted from low interest rates. No, neither of these questions suit Labour’s narrative.
Of courses we are having the wrong kind of Growth: it is Growth under a Conservative and not a Labour government
The UK’s economic position is perilous. Govt’s of whatever hue will encourage growth by whatever means. The Help to Buy scheme is helping to create confidence. Sadly, with so much capital invested in non-productive assets, consumers will spend their house value. This is unearned wealth. Hence a worsening in both trade and govt deficits. The BBC are right to question this but then they were wrong not to question it during the boom years pre 2008.
Allied to this is a sort of crony banking system which alas has the whip hand. No bank will ever be allowed to fail. Expect more turmoil – because nothing fundamental has changed.
See Dr Tim Morgan for more.
If HBOS had been allowed to fail UK plc would have gone with it.
Why would it Johnny? Did the assets it held simply not exist, or would have ceased to exist had it gone under?
Would its assets have covered all its potential losses? No, probably not, but they would have caused a correction to the balance sheets of the creditors fairly quickly and the market would have moved on.
Maybe if it had started a systemic collapse a lot of debt would have been written off in cross agreement between different banks, maybe at a rate in the pound.
And then what risk have we added to the system in saving a bank that had totally failed?
So I don’t think that it’s as clear cut as ‘it would have been disaster’ if we hadn’t stepped in to save HBOS. Though I admit that the commentariat would have us all believe that, because it was seen as a great moment for the expansion of state ownership – proof that only the state can keep markets operating.
Tony: purely from a public panic point of view and a resulting run on all the banks – social and economic chaos (remember Northern Rock?).
And ‘we’ didn’t save HBOS initially – Lloyds TSB shareholders did. When the true scale of the HBOS debts became clear, the government also had to step in but by then Brown and Blank – the Labour wrecking ball – had already reduced Loyds to rubble.
I think it would have been a better thing to let RBS/BOS fall and to have used the billions pumped into them to operate a ‘Bank Of Britain’ ran by the Bank of England offering loans to businesses at sensible levels and equity, along with Savings returns at a lower level than the interest charged, and sensible mortgages to worthy candidates at an affordable level. Think Bailey Building & Loan in ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’. NO cowboy banking, NO horse trading, NO futures, NO foreign debt packages. Basically what most of us assumed a proper bank would do.