Today’s forecast: DOOM

The weekend is a nice insulating blanket against financial troubles – with the stock market not trading, its possible to feel like everything’s peachy, and that Monday will be a brighter morn. But as a shepherd-warning red sky loomed over The City this morning, it appears that the financial forecast is for doom with scattered doom.

“Every day this week will be a picture of misery for the UK economy”, said Michael Saunders, an economist at Citigroup. It’s because quarterly reports are out this week, from industry and business to retail sales and mortgage data, all of which are likely to show losses in confidence and an economy shrinking for the first time since 1992. The UK enjoyed 64 successive quarters of growth before halted in the second quarter of 2008.

Elsewhere, you’ve got Ernst and Young saying we’re officially in recession, and it’s only going to get worse for three more quarters. “We may be talking about one of the most severe recessions in the post-war period”, according to Larry Meyer, chair of Macroeconomic Advisers in the US, while Larry Elliott in The Guardian does a roundup of the various doom-sayers here. And China is bricking it over its quarterly GDP figures being published today, with the FT changing its August prediction of a “gradual slowdown” to a “sharp slowdown” today. Plus Pakistan, Korea and Ukraine are all now or soon to be bailed out. Even Dubai is looking groggy.

Still, at least this guy is feeling flush.

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Hot Money | October 20, 2008 10:09AM |