It's not all bad news

Despite all the doom and gloom, Harvey Jones tells us why the recession isn't quite as bad as many believe.

They say you can prove anything with statistics, but it's hard to know what conclusions to draw from the raft of conflicting financial data on the UK economy.

Everybody is rightly gloomy about the future of UK PLC, but not all the figures reinforce the general woe.

Unemployment has hit a 12-year high of nearly 2 million, with another million job losses predicted this year. That should make everybody nervous, but consumer spending actually increased in January by 1.1%, according to the British Retail Consortium.

Britons are said to be frantically saving money rather than running up more debts, yet spending on debit and credit cards still grew 0.3% year-on-year in December, according to APACS.

Home repossessions are expected to leap to 75,000 in 2009, say the Council of Mortgage Lenders, a problem worsened by tumbling house prices. Yet Rightmove figures show prices increasing by 1.2% in February. Hamptons International has just reported a 50% rise in property viewings.

The UK is said to face the worst recession since either the early 1980s (OECD), 1946 (Mervyn King), 1931 (IMF) or 1909 (Ed Balls), yet nobody expects to see ragged children running barefoot in the streets or starving workers marching south from Jarrow.

So why the mismatch?

Blip, blip, blip

I'm genuinely bemused by some of these figures. They don't shake my pessimistic outlook, but they do make me pause for thought. My first instinct is to dismiss the positive numbers as a blip, or rather a series of blips.

January's consumer splurge was given a shove by hefty discounting in the sales, for example, while as Ed Bowsher has argued, Rightmove's house price uplift is unlikely to be sustained. But I'm still amazed to see any positive figures at all, given that we are supposedly on the verge of 1930s-style chaos (or 1980s-style industrial collapse, 1940s-era austerity or whatever happened in 1909).

One for the road

So are consumers in denial, recklessly continuing their binge with the bailiffs knocking at the door? Some will be, but fewer than before, now the punchbowl of easy credit that fuelled this binge has been drained. Given all the gloom, only hardcore party animals can still be in denial.

Consumer spending may be holding up because most people still feel secure in their jobs, and taking the opportunity to lavish their recent mortgage savings on some irresistable bargains. This is, after all, a two-tier recession. While many will lose their jobs and homes, others are cashing in on falling prices and interest rates.

Shoot the journalist

Or has the UK's notoriously excitable press overdone the downturn, making it seem worse than it actually is? Well, it wouldn't be the first time, but I don't think we can escape this recession by shooting the messenger.

That shrinking feeling

What really worries me is that the most desperate figures don't concern what has already happened, but what is still to come. The UK only officially tipped into recession in the final quarter of 2008, contracting 1.5%, on top of 0.6% in the third quarter. That is only the beginning, with the contraction expected to last at least another four quarters.

Last week, Bank of England governor, Mervin King predicted the economy would shrink by another 4% in 2009, and it could get even worse than that. On Monday, the Bank's deputy governor, Charlie Bean trumped his boss by saying there was "a roughly three in four chance" it could shrink even more.

This suggests that the reason there is still some good news around is that the full force of the recession has yet to hit.

No, it's not the 1930s

We've been through the phony war of tightening our belts and making our own jam, and now the casualties are just starting to come in. One of my friends has just been made redundant, another is slipping ever further behind on his mortgage repayments. The bad news is creeping closer to home.

Like stock markets, economies don't fall in a smooth, downward trajectory. The news isn't all bad, all the time, there will always be the odd blip, bear market rally and dead cat bounce.

So enjoy the bits of good news that we have, because they could be thin on the ground for the rest of the year. But comparisons with the devastation of the 1930s are misleading, because even if the UK contracts as much in percentage terms as it did then, it will be from an incomparably higher starting point.

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