Three more important data releases today put further nails in Osborne’s economic coffin. The big news of the day was the ONS release of data on the labour market, which showed that all of the good news we had seen over earlier months this year has now gone into reverse.
First, the number of unemployed on the ILO count increased by 38,000 over the quarter to reach 2.49 million and the unemployment rate rose to 7.9 per cent.
Second, the claimant count in July 2011 was 1.56 million, up 37,100 on the previous month and up 98,600 on a year earlier.
Third, the unemployment rate for 16-to-24-year-olds was 20.2 per cent in the three months to June 2011, up 0.2 percentage points from the three months to March 2011.
There were 949,000 unemployed 16-to-24-year-olds in the three months to June 2011, up 15,000 from the three months to March 2011.
Fourth, though total employment is up on the year by 250,000, the total number of hours worked, which is a better measure of the labour input, was 910.6 million in the three months to June 2011, down 11.3 million from the three months to March 2011 and down by seven million from April-June 2010 when this government took office.
Fifth, in the three months to June 2011, 154,000 people had been made redundant, up 32,000 from the three months to March 2011 and up 4,000 from a year earlier.
Sixth, the number of job vacancies in the three months to July 2011 was down 22,000 on the three months to April 2011 and down 28,000 on a year earlier.
Seventh, regular pay growth remained benign at 2.2 per cent.
Chris Williamson, chief economist at Markit, commented:
Survey data indicates that unemployment is likely to continue to rise in coming months, as private-sector employers fail to make up for public-sector job cuts. The Markit/CIPS PMI survey showed companies reducing their headcounts in July due to concerns over the economic outlook and recruitment firms reported that the number of people they had placed in permanent jobs had risen at a rate only marginally higher than June’s near two-year low. This tallies with official data showing that the number of job vacancies fell to the lowest in almost two years. Business confidence clearly needs to rise before employment growth will pick up again but, at the moment, the surveys suggest that companies remain worried about economic growth both at home and abroad and are generally erring towards cost-cutting rather than expansion.
None of this is good news.
Then there was the release of the Bank of England’s agents’ report on the economy, which suggested little evidence of growth in the economy. They reported evidence of weak growth in spending on consumer goods and services. The agents’ score for growth in goods exports had fallen back somewhat from recent highs and a slowing in the pace of growth of manufacturing output, reflecting softening domestic demand.
Finally, the minutes of the August MPC meeting showed a vote of 9-0 for no change, which meant that the two inflation nutters Spencer Dale and Martin Weale had seen the error of their ways and reversed their wrongheaded votes for rate rises. Once again, my friend Adam Posen voted for more QE.
This paragraph is especially telling, suggesting the risks to the downside have increased:
The key risk to the downside remained that demand growth would not be sufficiently strong to absorb the pool of spare capacity in the economy, causing inflation to fall materially below target in the medium term. News over the month had generally reinforced the weak tone of indicators of global activity growth over the past few months, which had been particularly notable in data releases for the advanced economies. While some of the slowing would have reflected the impact of continuing disruption to global supply chains and the effects of the elevated price of oil, the committee judged it increasingly likely that the global slowdown would prove to be more prolonged than previously assumed.
Far from being vindicated, the data is giving Osborne and his failed economic strategy a deserved comeuppance. There has been zero positive news on the economic data front for some time now.
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