David Blanchflower

No amount of spin can get around the fact that there was bad news yesterday from the Office for National Statistics on the labour market. This was not much of a surprise given that the data from several qualitative surveys has been less than stellar over the past few weeks. The KPMG/Rec Report on Jobs also showed that permanent placements fell for a third month ... read more

David Cameron has pushed for a new measure of well-being as part of his Big Society nonsense, but I have some bad news for him: happiness has been falling fast under the coalition.

How do I know this? The European Union already regularly asks thousands of people in their Eurobarometer surveys how satisfied they are with their lives. Data for 2011 is now in, and the graph below plots the ... read more

A year ago, the Financial Times asked economists for their views on how the economy would develop.

Of particular interest is the question: "How will the recovery develop over the next 12 months? Is strong recent growth in the UK symptomatic of a resilient economy?"

The highlights were that a majority were bear-ish on the outcomes. Yours truly seemed to be pretty close to the mark: "The ... read more

In a speech on the economy yesterday that was 2,235 words long, an out-of-touch David Cameron only mentioned jobs and unemployment once each. He didn't mention the young at all in a week when youth unemployment hit the million mark. It is becoming increasingly apparent that Cameron is a) totally out of his depth when it comes to the economy; b) has no clue what to do to ... read more

Today is the day to report back on the battle between the coalition and the opposition over who has been right on the economy. Keynes versus Hayek; growth-deniers versus deficit-deniers (supposedly like me). The jury has now reached its verdict and the coalition is guilty as charged -- they have destroyed growth and pushed the UK into a recession worse than we saw in the 1930s. Contrary to the coalition ... read more

I am really hoping that one of these mornings I am going to wake up to some good economic news. But today was definitely not that day. The continuing flow of bad news on top of bad news is something we are all now becoming accustomed to.

I can only imagine how Vince and George feel every day when they open the economics and business pages of the newspapers. I did ... read more

Andrew Sentance on his website has posed ten questions that he wants answered by Mervyn King. So I decided to answer them myself.

1. The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) resisted arguments for a rise in interest rates in the second half of 2010 and earlier this year. And yet it has moved very quickly to mobilise more quantitative easing (QE) based on short-term worries about economic ... read more

A couple of points. Some have claimed that the UK private sector created half a million jobs over the past 12 months -- including, apparently, the Prime Minister at PMQs yesterday.

So let's help Dave get his facts straight. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) only provides data on employment in the public and private sector every three months and the latest data is only available up until June 2011. ... read more

The ONS data release on the labour market this morning was horrendous. Unemployment jumped to 8.1 per cent, up 0.4 per cent on the quarter. The total number of unemployed hit 2.57 million, which is the largest quarterly increase since the three months to July 2009. Nearly 900,000 have been unemployed for at least a year and 425,000 for at least two years. The unemployment rate is now in double ... read more

Denmark's new three-party coalition government has announced that the primary aim of its economic policy is to secure a balance between revenues and spending and create growth by bringing forward public investment. The new Danish prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, who is Neil Kinnock's daughter-in-law, unveiled her coalition cabinet on Monday and indicated that her government would take a radically different approach from the austerity measures being adopted by other European ... read more

There were a lot of very embarrassed members of the economics staff at the Bank of England, this morning. They messed up and it is certain that Sir Mervyn was not pleased, as now the MPC is in a hole. More of that in a minute. First, we need some background.

The Bank of England has put a good deal of resources into trying to understand the patterns of revisions to ... read more

Many newspapers are carrying the story that the GFK NOP consumer confidence improved between August and September, although apparently not significantly so. It seems that UK consumers became more optimistic about the economic outlook and spending; GFK NOP apparently reported that their index of sentiment gained 1 point from August to minus 30. Sorry, it didn't.

This presents data watchers like this correspondent with a puzzle, ... read more