As Chris Giles notes in the FT this morning:
Independent?
Experts?
Really?
The evidence to support the claim is hard to find.
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What does the OBR know that no-one else does? Rejoining the EU single market and customs union next year, perhaps?
This is an obvious case of projection – the psychological version – where the OBR’s belief systems are being made real and actual reality is not going to be forthcoming.
The recipe for an economy needs money. Taking out ingredients when baking a cake to a well known recipe will result in a different cake or no cake at all.
Taking money from the economy is the same. How the hell can the economy grow/the cake rise when you’ve taken out or reducing the ingredients?
Frankly, and I’m sorry for the language – this is nothing but a load of fucking nonsense.
Reeves should be sacked – and it has nothing to do with her gender. She’s hopeless.
Yes 100% agree with you. The problem is, as long as Starmer is the PM I suspect that the next Chancellor will be more of the same. They both need booting out.
I seem to remember a competition to provide a forecast for the UK economy that was checked a year or so later and the most accurate one won.
The winners were a team of dustmen
So perhaps as they swing past next week I will go out and ask
Has there been any independent review of the OBR’s performance? How good are their predictions? Are they like weather forecasters – often wrong in the medium tolong term, but better than nothing? Or are they spitting in the wind?
There are academic reviews -all pointing out how bad they are
Of course, any future prediction is likely to be ‘wrong’…. That’s why we take a range given uncertainties …….
The variation between these FT forecasts seems to be surprisingly small ~2% over a 5 year period. I suspect that it is impossible for anyone to get an accurate forecast given the uncertainty of global trade and the day-to-day variation in policy coming out of the USA, or the uncertainty of any future military involvement or conflict in the short/medium term. Similarly, stressing over 0.1% growth or reduction in the economy is nonsense.
This is why it seems mad for the introduction of more austerity. Targeting a ~£6Bn in welfare reduction (which I think is about 0.5% of UK government spending of about ~1250 Bn) — the austerity cuts have a stated ambition to balance by playing around with small amounts when the global uncertainties are so much bigger.
It seems the OBR have got obsessed with making models balance numbers to small decimal places, when the uncertainties in the model assumptions must suggest such precision is nonsense. Classic rooky error?
This total ridiculous obsession with spurious accuracy is absurd.