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ECONOMISTS warned yesterday that Britain could be due another slump as revised official data showed weaker than expected annual growth following a collapse in investment and a record trade deficit.
The latest evidence that Chancellor George Osborne’s back-of-a-fag-packet economic “plan” has failed saw the Office for National Statistics (ONS) downgrade its growth estimate between October 2013 and September 2014 to 2.6 per cent — 0.4 points lower than previously reported.
Its latest figures also revealed that most of the economy’s expansion has come from household spending as big businesses sit on hoards of cash, refusing to invest.
Friedrich Merz’s call for a new Plaza Accord ignores how Washington’s 1985 currency ambush destroyed Japan without fixing US deficits — China, a sovereign socialist state with 1.4 billion consumers, cannot be bullied the same way, writes CARLOS MARTINEZ
