On the road to recovery? Don’t be daft

G Smith

But surely the most remarkable fact in the detailed report is this:
"The number of people in public sector employment was 6.04 million in June 2009, up 13,000 from March 2009. The number of people in private sector employment was 22.84 million, down 212,000 from March 2009."
Public sector still expanding....amazing really!

Nicholas

Stagnating? Hardly surprising when the government is doing the same and its leader (in the photo here) looks like a cross between one of the zombies from Night of the Living Dead and an aged version of The Joker from Batman suffering a severe sense of humour loss.

Even that shirt and suit have the look of the Chapel of Rest about them.

Time for a change Gordon. Call the General Election. You could all do with a nice long rest from politics.

TrevorsDen

Unemployment as an indicator of the depth of the recession is not as reliable as in the past. Large groups of workers have taken pay cuts.
But even this may just be delaying the effect. Honda in Swindon shut down for 4 months and made some redundancies and the workers took a 3% pay cut.
But now I read a snippet saying they are again looking for further voluntary redundancies.

'Stagnating' is the right word.

bergen

It may be just a glitch but new work has been falling back again for the last few weeks and I'm beginning to fear a double dip.

Chuck Unsworth

All depends on one's definition of 'employment', doesn't it?

In2minds

Nicholas @ 12.22pm - “Even that shirt and suit have the look of the Chapel of Rest about them”.

Nice, very nice!

Billericay Dave

G Smith good spot in the real figures hope someone nails gordo for this ! the year on year numbers are stunning creating jobs to keep the true unemployment number down

2trueblue

When the banks start lending and the same banks start giving decent rates for savings, then we have recovery. We are not even out of intensive care. Right now we are hanging on by our fingertips, and hope that the next dip won't be a big one.

Jim

This is a brief hiatus in what will be a continued serious decline, once the public spending cuts/tax rises become reality next year (or earlier if there is a bond buyers strike). We have halted the decline for now at the expense of the public finances, which WILL have to be balanced at some point.

Kinglear

Fear a double dip? Of course it's a double dip. Where are the incentives to go out and invest? Where is the money to do it?
I recently read that the banks are UNDERlending by a combined total of #215 billion pa compared to what our economy requires for stability. OF COURSE we are still contracting - and will do until that #215 billion deficit is wiped out, either by a further fall in activity or the banks lending US the money rather than this rotten venal incompetent government.

NickP

I rarely if ever take the word of bankers at face value, but anecdotally I hear evidence supporting their contention that they do want to lend money but businesses do not want to borrow. The Catch 22 is that they will want to borrow when the signs are positive but until then they have the hatches battened down tight. And for as long as they remain so, growth will be sluggish or non-existent.

Ironically, those adventurous businesses who see recession as an opportunity to grab market share WILL borrow (if they can meet very high standards of security) and will succeed.

A great quote from a very progressive and successful entrepreneur I know: Now is Normal. And he's right. If you are waiting for the next train to come in, you've already missed it.

John David Barnett

He could do with a nice long rest, full stop!

Ian C

While 'our' banks claim that there is no demand for credit, it is hardly surprising. They are offering loans at 13-15% ("typical") today with base rate at 0.5%. They used to offer credit at 6.9% (unsecured over 1-8 years) with base rates at 5-10 times as high.

Their desire to lend is dicated by having to rebuild balance sheets that are still in tatters in spite of taxpayers capital and guarantees.

As someone here has said, there is and will be no recovery until savers are rewarded for saving and borrowers know what the reasonable medium to long term cost of finance will be. At present it is worse than a middle-eastern bazar. So hell freezes over rather than do business in such an environment.

Parallax Brief

The Parallax Brief is tempted to call this deliberately disingenuous, but will at least wonder whether the Spectator quite understands what people mean when they say “on the road to recovery”. From a basic level of comprehension, a reasonably educated person should be able to understand that being “on the road” to something means that one has not arrived at the destination.
However, beyond this, from an economic standpoint, when we refer to the “economy” we’re almost always referring to GDP, not employment. To be sure, employment is often paramount in shaping people’s views of the economy, but when people say “the economy is recovering” they always mean, “GDP is starting to move upward again.”

Using unemployment figures to refute this, therefore, is rather like arguing that a pop song isn’t moving up the charts because you haven’t heard anyone whistling the tune on the street.

Unemployment will continue to rise even as GDP increases, because it is a lagging indicator. So, while the Spectator is right to imply that America is recovering, by it’s own standards it isn’t, because unemployment is still on the up. That’s also why Britain entered technical recession before unemployment began to soar. But back then, the Spectator preferred to rely on GDP data, didn’t it?

As for those who believe the recession will be a double dip: it certainly will be if someone steams in and slashes spending before the recession has ended.

Abraham

god forbid consumers don't get their credit. how will they purchase the latest games consol or home applianace otherwise?

2trueblue

A lot of people educated or not understand recovery. The difference in this recession is that we have minute by minute news, lots of experts and lots of spin. These same people did not see it coming, were busy telling us that things were great, (one of the big investment banks were advising people to buy Northern Rocks shares in June before it all blew up)

There are those of us who did see it coming, got our money out of commercial and residential property, and equities in April 2007, and right now can not see the recovery.
We take the view, wait and see,and know that figures can be skewed, especially when so much is at stake. So called experts sometimes look only where they think it is coming from and need a broader view.
Japan has not come out of its lost decade becaus the Japanese do not spend. How will the world recover when there is no new pattern for who will be the next market?

Security of fuel is our biggest problem and we have a government who over the past 12 yrs have made no provision for that.

Figures mean nothing if you rely on them alone. And yes we do understand recovery, it is when people are confident and go out and spend.