The Bank of England has come up witha scary figure as the "cost" of Brexit, £500M a week.
Of course it turns out that this is the difference between the size of the economy now and where the BoE thinks the economy would be if we hadn't voted to leave the EU. Since no-one, not even the BoE, knows what might have been to any degree of accuracy, the "where we would be" figure could be anything they like to produce. There's no build up to this figure, just a wish list of what it could have been (and, judging by recent history, wouldn't have been) spent on. It would have been more convincing if they'd said how many Trident missiles or jets for the new aircraft carriers we could have bought for the £60Bn.
It's also a bit of a puzzle where all this extra economic activity would be coming from, given that we are now at pretty well full employment.
Sunday, 27 January 2019
Let's not use those figures.....
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10 comments:
"nobody moves or statistical rigour gets hurt"
I found this on Facebook, where a commenter replied to my comment about the unemployment figures by saying that you can't trust anything from the government as they lie to us all the time!
Project Fear in full flow. And as the Bank's forecast on anything, especially interest rates and inflation has always been absolutely woeful, this forecast has no credibility.
"We are now at pretty well full employment" - depends how you define it. What proportion of over-16s are in full-time employment (say 35 hours-plus)?
"depends how you define it. What proportion of over-16s are in full-time employment (say 35 hours-plus)?"
Probably some huge proportion, but thats more down to the welfare system making work pay less than benefits.
My definition of full employment is how hard is it to get decent tradesmen - they are currently as rare as hens teeth, in the south of England at least, so I conclude there's obviously a lack of people to do such jobs, so there can't be much slack in the system.
S, yup, we are not going to make up all that economic activity employing loads of unskilled young people.
"Probably some huge proportion, but thats more down to the welfare system making work pay less than benefits."
Presumably you mean "small proportion", if you are referring to the unskilled. Universal Credit was supposed to sort this out, before it got taken over by the "starve 'em back to work" brigade. Not that the work is necessarily out there for the unskilled, but if, say, we had Citizen's Income, you'd soon see the number of people working very few hours come down. If I was a conspiracy theorist, I'd say that the system is deliberately rigged to keep large numbers on benefits, so they cam be used as hate figures. It's really hard to see why the system can't be changed to make everyone who works better off than everyone who doesn't, without making those who don't work starve.
Surely the BoE can prove this by comparing their past predictions with what happened. If they were 100% accurate then maybe they are correct now.
LF. hahahahhahah...hahahahahah BoE 100% correct? Hahahahha. I doubt that it's 10% 'correct'. It's a hot bed of punk Keynesian claptrappery.
LF, I don't know about the BoE's economists, but statistical studies apparently show that economic forecasting has a poorer record than chance, i.e they get it right less than 50% of the time. I think the fact that the same economists didn't see the crash of 2008 coming probably gives some idea of their forecasting ability.
In economics full employment is around 97% leaving a margin for people looking and choosing between jobs and other categories.
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