No wonder they call it the dismal science. After a 2010 in which economists loudly fretted about double-dip recessions and imploding bond markets, the economy obliged by, er, growing robustly over the summer while buyers of government debt piled into gilts.
This time, with consensus predictions for the fourth-quarter GDP figures coming in at around 0.5% growth, yesterday’s initial estimate from the Office for National Statistics concluded that the economy had shrunk by a shock 0.5%. As has been said by smarter people than I, it’s a wonder that economists keep trying to predict the future – they can’t even agree about the past.
