It won't be a surprise if other countries see similar reports. Once the full extent of the budget chopping kicks into full gear the statisticians in the UK will have even more recession numbers to examine. Without government spending now, the economy will only decline. The US really has been fortunate that Obama did not fall into the camp of budget choppers who seem to be in power these days. He should have gone for more and is probably going to struggle now getting this done in an election year but it was and will be the right thing to do. The Guardian:
The deepest recession in Britain's post-war history was even more severe than previously feared, the government said today.
Fresh information collected by the Office for National Statistics showed that the peak to trough decline in output was 6.4% of gross domestic product rather than the original 6.2% estimate.
The new figures confirmed that the six successive quarters of negative growth from spring 2008 until autumn 2009 were the toughest for the economy since the Great Depression of the 1930s, harsher even than the slump of the early 1980s.
Growth resumed in the final three months of 2009 as the UK economy responded to the emergency cuts in interest rates, the cheaper pound and higher government spending. The ONS made no changes to its estimate of a 0.4% expansion in the fourth quarter of last year or its 0.3% growth estimate for the first quarter of 2010, but said the role of government spending in the first three months of this year in underpinning the economy had been more significant than first thought.
