By Gemma Harle, managing director, Tenet Lime
If you believe everything you read you will undoubtedly be mired in doom and gloom at the moment.
Certainly the macro economic news is not completely rosy. With a further £50 billion of QE on the horizon in the fourth quarter, taking the stock up to £425 billion, and the unknown impact the “Funding for Lending “ scheme, it is possible - if there is no improvement – the Bank of England will continue to deflate the nation’s debt. We may yet see an interest rate cut in November too.
But not everything is as it seems.
Q2 GDP figures have been revised twice leaving one analyst to comment that, accounting for the Jubilee effect and an expected growth in Q3, we may be recovering from a technical recession we never had.
Two months ago, the Office for National Statistics told us the economy had contracted by 0.7% in the second quarter. Now it says the decline was closer to 0.4%.
That still sounds grim, but the implication is that the economy might have grown slightly, had it not been for the extra bank holiday. Already The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said this week that services output, covering a range of sectors from retail to finance, rose 1.1% on the month.
The service sector accounts for about 75% of UK economic output (GDP).
As part of that service sector we have certainly not seen an exaggerated effect negative or otherwise from the Jubilee and Olympics.
Business has remained reassuringly steady. The imminent arrival of the Mortgage Market Review will challenge us again but it is broadly supportive of brokers and will help enshrine our success in the future.
If the good news on the ground and now in the figures coming out is that we are no longer going backwards (or even backwards at such a rate) then we owe it to ourselves to be cheerful.
Let’s face it we have been miserable enough when news has been bad.
