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This is just a storm before the hurricane
Jonathan Prynn, Consumer Affairs Editor23.12.08
The statistics of this recession - for that is what it is regardless of whether or not the Whitehall wonks have officially declared it - are starting to look truly mind-blowing.
Today's gruesome revised GDP figures have sent City scribblers scurrying back to their forecasts. Many now foresee output shrinking by 2.5 per cent next year, making it the worst single year for the economy since 1947.
For anyone who lived through the darkest days of the Thatcher recession in the early Eighties or the Heath recession in the mid-Seventies that is a startling and scary statistic.
It is difficult to foresee just how severe the impact will be on all our everyday lives. But it will be profound. If the economists are right, this Christmas - for all the drama of the Woolies collapse - is a lull before a storm of historic proportions.
There are more frightening forecasts out today. Deutsche Bank's George Buckley, one of the more respected of the younger generation of City economists, now sees house prices falling by 35 per cent in cash terms and 40 per cent in real terms -after allowing for inflation - before they bottom out at the end of 2010.
That would take property values back to the levels they were at in the spring of 2003. Here comes another jaw dropping statistic. That is only a year after house prices recovered- in real terms - to the level of their previous peak in 1989.
In other words, if the house price collapse is as bad as he predicts, almost 20 years of house price gains will have been virtually wiped out.
If you then think how much the way we think about our wealth has been driven by perceptions of rising prices over that period it gives you a flavour of how profound the coming upheavals are likely to be.
Gordon Brown may be destined to go down in history as the Michael Fish of British politics. The man who told the nation there would be no hurricane - no more boom and bust.
