Is it all doom and gloom or are there rays of sunshine on the horizon? It started mid-May with the Bank of England governor Sir Mervyn King upgrading the economic forecast for the rest of this year. The British Chamber of Commerce (BCI) was also slightly more optimistic in its forecasts and reports on business confidence. In the last few days we’ve had three forecasts on monthly performance for the manufacturing, service and construction sectors, all of them showing signs of growth. While no-one is denying that there are some years to go on paying down household and business debt, as the Telegraph’s CItyAM editor Allister Heath emphasises this week, is his doom-laden piece predicting an even more cataclysmic crisis really justified? He cites the need to further massively cut the welfare state and also to what he calls the “terrifying recklessness” of the Government’s proposed Help to Buy scheme that could stoke up another credit-fuelled housing bubble. It doesn’t help that we are only building 100,000 new houses a year instead of the 300,000 that we need to satisfy demand. However, if the scheme were to stimulate house building we might stem house price inflation and avoid a bubble. It could also be used to redress the scarcity of smaller homes for both first time buyers and older people wanting to downsize as well as provide jobs for the approximate 20% of all SMEs that a thriving construction industry could employ. We all know that “bad news” sells papers but there is also a converse argument that we need businesses to believe they have a future. With some measure of confidence in the future, businesses and SMEs in particular might begin to invest in growth. So are you a pessimist, a realist or an optimist?
Posted on: Thu, 06 Jun 2013 14:35:11 +0000
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