TM doing aggression Yikes - it's "any form of customs border" in the Irish Sea now

Quick comment on nowcasting UK incomes:

STOP IT

I'm talking to you:
@ONS
@resfoundation
@TheIFS

You can't agree on the numbers
The predictions are terrible
It confuses the truth

No data > rubbish data @ONS @resfoundation @TheIFS It shouldn't be difficult to nowcast (properly described as Thencasting because we are talking 2017-18) incomes, right.

We have the latest survey and roughly know what happened to employment, earnings, taxes and benefits...

... but the results MUST be terribly sensitive

RPI KLAXON

Quite an extraordinary @LordsEconCom hearing into the RPI

John Pullinger, national statistician says its "not an if, but a when" the RPI gets reformed @LordsEconCom He faced pretty hostile questioning.

Rightly so. The @ONS position of refusing to improve the RPI while having a statutory duty to do so was indefensible.

Lord Turnbull called it "highly embarrassing and very unfortunate"

The good, bad (mostly) and ugly of the Q1 national economic accounts

When the economy grows only 0.2%, there will not be much good, but

GOOD
This was revised higher from 0.1%, due to a new methodology for construction. Essentially, this is taking usual slow revisions early BAD

Business investment. Total investment has been unaffected by Brexit, but business investment growth effectively stopped since the Conservative victory in 2015 and uncertainty descended.

Compare the two here

A primer on levels, changes and changes in changes of UK productivity

i.e what people get wrong all the time

LEVELS
UK workers produce less in an hour than French or Germans

H/T @bankofengland Andy Haldane whose speech provides most of the charts)
bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/fi… @bankofengland CHANGES

Productivity levels have been growing over time

(The upward slope in the levels lines in these two charts)

Japanese ambassador says pointedly that Japan was first to express concerns about Brexit in Sept 2016 “because we work through summer”

Comes after acceptance U.K./EU negotiations will shut down over summer #SMMTSummit He adds that U.K. government has studied its paper “recently”

“It’s taken a little time”

John James, CEO of Star group, a customs agent says without an agreement there will be a “catastrophe” in the south east Lorry flows have risen fourfold since 1993 and customs agents have declined. “We believe it will be impossible to get goods cleared because of a lack of agents”

My regular plea for people to stop saying U.K. income (or wealth) inequality is rising.

It is not. And hasn’t for a generation.

But it did rise a lot in the 1980s

All from @TheIFS living standards report today ifs.org.uk/uploads/R145%2… In fact middle incomes have been growing fastest. Top and bottom have struggled in recent year’s.

(So poorest further adrift. But richest are closer to normal)

All you need to know (concisely) about a supposed ‘Brexit dividend’ for National Health Service ft.com/content/bbfde9… via @financialtimes Sunday Telegraph uses a £20bn figure divide by 52. Which is the real increase after 5 years

Real👍
5 year cumulaton 👎
Locking into Brexit 🤦‍♀️

We need to talk about VAT, borders and Brexit.

Being inside the customs union, solving regulatory alignment doesn’t solve this border problem

The choice is infrastructure, ECJ (and EU consent) or massive fraud

ft.com/content/7ff44a… via @financialtimes VAT on goods exempts exports and charges imports.

To avoid fraud where untaxed goods circulate freely, you’ve got to know when they cross borders.

1) Non EU: we check the containers/parcels

2) EU: we use a paper trail

1 requires infrastructure
2 requires EU consent

Extraordinary evidence at Treasury committee from Jon Thompson, CEO of HMRC on customs and Brexit today The Brexiter favourite Max Fac - would cost business between £17 and £20bn a year

- that's almost 1% of GDP

- just for filling in forms

Thanks #Brexit

Seems to be a lot of confusion about the drop in UK consumer credit growth - termed here a "credit slump" by Barclays Research Some debt charities, such as @Money_Advice, credit growth is still too strong

The Consumer Credit Trade Assoc blames unnecessary regulation and lower lending...

But...

PUBLIC SERVICE KLAXON - Accuracy of Brexit economics forecasts edition

Brexit supporting economists come.........last Just to be clear what the chart shows. The foreacsts I have used are the first full published ones after the #EURef.

The period chosen is the cumulative growth rate between Q2 2016 and Q1 2018 (ie all the relevant data)

Forecasting UK productivity is a nightmare (or why we should feel sympathy for @OBR_UK)

1. This is the productivity trend facing OBR in June 2010 - stable trend followed by a dip... So OBR goes for a return to previous trend. - totally reasonable

When talking about the accuracy of economic forecasts - though much derided by @SteveBakerHW, the @bankofengland Aug 2016 is doing best 1/ This chart is unfair to the @bankofengland and other forecasts that were more pessimistic than reality because one big error was to underestimate the strength of output in that corpse - the eurozone - to which the UK is shackled 2/

In 1981, my parents bought this new car in Germany in exactly this horrible shade of green It was cheap because it was end of range and the pound was extremely strong