Posted: Mar 14, 2018 9:54 am
OlivierK wrote:Average real wages have fallen by 0.4%, but were steadily growing at 2% before the referendum. All that growth has been lost, plus another 0.4%, making the forecast seem quite reasonable, so I'd call it 3/7, with some indicators that housing may decline, although not in the time frame projected.
I'm really not convinced that changing the way you count to increase the change by a factor of 6, to 2.4% and then saying that 2.4% hits a prediction of between 2.8% and 4% is a fair way of counting*.
OlivierK wrote:That's still a long way short of 100% cock, to me.
I'm overstating my general disdain for economic forecasting for comic effect (it's all economic forecasting that is terrible, not Brexit forecasting specifically). It's not 100% horse cock. They hit 2 of their 8 predictions and did worse than guessing, with more indicators moving in the opposite direction entirely than hitting their target. I guess you could say that's 75% horse cock?
*And the ONS statistics show that in the previous year real wages had grown 1.5%, not 2% anyway, with the rate down to just 0.4% in the first 6 months of 2016, with no steady trend of 2% at any time in recent years.
Edit: As far as real wage growth goes, there have been reports of a "lost decade" on wages going back years. Here's a Guardian article from 2014, before the Brexit referendum was even on the agenda: https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... ons-record reporting wage stagnation going back a decade.