January is a depressing time for many of us. The weather is awful, we live in darkness and our bodies struggle to cope following the month-long Bacchanalian delights of the festive season. January is one long hangover, and, if we are to believe everything we read, this week is the nadir of that comedown.
The week began badly with what has now become known as “Blue Monday”, which, as the third Monday of the year is “statistically” – and there is apparently an equation to prove this – the most depressing day of the year. Credit card bills revealing the full extent of our Christmas madness land on our door mats, New Years’ resolutions embarked upon with the best intentions collapse, the terrible weather really gets underway while the prospect of Summer remains, if we’re lucky, at least and six months away. Of course, the equation is nonsense and its creator Dr Cliff Arnall, who devised it for a travel firm, has since admitted it is meaningless. Even so, every year the equation and notion of Blue Monday get wheeled out by the media as though the third Monday of the year was scientifically proven to be the most depressing day of the year for all of us, no matter who we are or what we are doing.
Given the week got off to such an inauspicious start, it was perhaps unsurprising that it would end with another story of apparent doom and gloom. This was delivered in the shape of the Q4 GDP figures released today. The media immediately began shrieking warnings of a triple-dip recession, but if you make it past the doom-andgloom headlines, you’ll notice the overall story is not quite so negative. Yes, the UK economy is clearly in a bad place, but if leading indicators are to be believed, modest positive growth should be just around the corner. There are other factors at play too. As Aviva Investors senior economist Stewart Robertson points out: “This poor reading for Q4 partly reflects the reversal of some special factors that influenced the previous quarter including the extra bank holiday in the spring, some volatile construction numbers and the Olympic boost.
“If you look at the second half of last year in aggregate, the economy has actually grown by +0.6%. That, in my opinion, is a reasonable reflection of the underlying picture – modest growth at an annual pace of 1% to 1.5% which is weak, but still growth.” And, like many figures over the last few years, it is quite possible that Q4 will actually be revised a little higher. So while there are clearly problems, it is not all bleak. Besides, you’ve just made it through the worst week of the year; how bad can it be?
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