The UK is now officially in its longest recorded recession, as official figures released by the government today reveal a 0.4% drop in gross domestic product (GDP) for the third quarter of 2009. This came as quite a shock as many economists were forecasting (rather prematurely, it seems) an end to the recession, after five (and now six) consecutive quarters where growth fell, on the eve of the reporting of these figures. What this bad news reaffirms is that nobody knows shit...or to put it more eloquently, in the wise words of the Victorian economist Alfred Marshall, economics is 'not a body of concrete truth but an engine for the discovery of concrete truth'.
To all my friends in the UK, what this means for you is that you are going to have to persevere for a bit longer. A recovery is not possible without greater consumer confidence and on a day like today, confidence is going to take a beating. To really add salt to your wounds, whatever you're earning in GB£ just fell in value a little bit more against both the US$ and the Euro as of this morning. Times are hard but all we can do is keep doing what we're doing.
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