Speaking on BBC’s Newsnight last night, he said the MPC misread the data and could have forecast the recession sooner. He is retiring from the MPC this summer but was calling for an interest rate cut long before the MPC began to cut rates.
Speaking on the programme he said: “It’s quite clear if you look now at the data that the UK went into recession in about April or May 2008. And it was pretty clear in the data then, people just weren't reading it right.
"There are some difficulties in actually getting accurate data in a recession. It’s hard to seasonally adjust things and get the right data, and get data that, if you like, forecasts things very well, in the way that it did in benign times.
"But if you look back now and say: ‘what data did we have at the beginning of 2008?’, the answer is, I think, that we could have forecasted, we could have looked at the qualitative data.”
He also predicted that 100,000 people a month would lose their job this year.
