News Trends Today

The news is that majority of western countries are showing signs of recovery from the recent economic depression. However, this is not true of Britain. It appears that Britain is still stuck deep down in a prolonged recession but speculators suggest that growth is just around the corner. The last quarter showed another shrinkage in the economy to 0.3 percent compared with past 3 months, says the office of national statistics. This shrinkage is said to be a mild improvement over the anticipated 0.4 percent shrinkage that analysts claimed would have occurred earlier this summer.

Says economist Charles Davis at the center for economic and Business Research, “The third-quarter GDP data for the United Kingdom showed a minor upward revision, in line with expectations,” “This is still some way short of the return to positive growth seen in the eurozone and OECD as a whole,”

Most other European countries like France, Germany, Japan and the US have started to return growth following the worst global economic crises since the First World War.

Britain is continuing to suffer from towering unemployment and enormous public debt caused by the financial crises. The public had demanded a general election sometime next year and it is expected that Prime Minster Gordon’s labor government is on its way out.

The British economy has had six consecutive quarters of negative growth, placing it into the longest recession since records were collected in 1955.

The shrinkage of the economy by 0.3 and not 0.4 percent did assure some economists that perhaps the country is on the mend. Said HIS Global Insight economist Howard Archer, “The good news is that UK GDP contracted modestly less than previously estimated in the third quarter.”

“This is also good news for we economists as it means we were slightly less wrong in our forecasts of a return to growth. The bad news is that the data still show the economy in recession in the third quarter and so we economists were still wrong. But we will be right in our forecasts that the economy will finally return to growth in the fourth quarter,” he added.

Although France Germany and USA claim to have officially pulled out of the recession, this has no resulted in more jobs and unemployment in all these countries still remains high. On Tuesday, the US economy grew at an annual pace of 2.8% in the 3^rd quarter.

Analysis are again going to look at the British data to assess the true situation, but looking around the country it appears that business is down, real estate market has completely collapsed, unemployment is at record high level and the public simply is not spending any money.

Analysts say that for Britain, the road to recovery is going to take at least the better part of next year.