The ice age may not be coming

Further to my "London Calling" post of 4 July, the IMF has yet again revised what it thinks will happen to the UK economy.

After warning in May that "Brexit is going to be bad to very, very bad" and in June that "the reaction is expected to be negative and could be severe", it now says that the reaction to the Leave vote has been over-egged. Actually it said "Financial markets have proven resilient in the weeks after the referendum. The reaction has been orderly and contained".

It has revised its estimate of UK growth to 1.7% for this year (down from the earlier prediction of 1.9% but they had warned of Brexit causing a recession) and 1.3%  next. This latter figure is down significantly from 2.2%.  However, their new projection for this year would put UK growth behind only the USA of the G7 nations and the third fastest behind USA and Canada in the next year. So we would still be growing faster than Germany or France over the next two years.

I suspect all this is very premature, but one is reminded of the old Mark Twain quote "reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated".

Mind, it's an ill wind. Without examining the data too closely, I suspect that what they've done is reflect the "chilling effect" on the world economy Brexit by reducing all the G7 countries' growth figures. So we're dragging them down with us!