In the PBR, the government predicted that the British economy would start growing again by the third quarter of this year. Brown and Darling have both subsequently tried to put some wiggle room into this pledge, which now they seem almost certain to fail to meet. I wonder if this prediction from Brown today, reported by the Washington Post, will come back to haunt him in the same way:
The IMF is predicting that the global economy will start growing again in 2010. It is certainly a better bet that the global economy will start to grow again this year than the British one, but there are still a fair few economists who think that that won’t be the case.“Together, these actions give us confidence that the global economy can return to trend growth even faster than the International Monetary Fund is predicting,” Brown said.
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