These are punchy gross home product (GDP) numbers and no mistake.
Progress of 0.7% within the first quarter is not only sturdy; it is stronger than the 0.6% most economists had anticipated. GDP per head, a greater measure of dwelling requirements (because it divides the full quantity of revenue generated throughout the economic system by the inhabitants), was up 0.5%.
And examine the UK to our different counterparts within the G7 group of industrialised economies, and the UK appears prefer it had the strongest progress of all within the first quarter.
There’s, briefly, a lot for Rachel Reeves to have fun in these figures.
However there’s a nagging doubt, too. The important thing little bit of context right here is the one you’ll be very conscious of: Donald Trump’s commerce battle. The US president’s tariffs have prompted such a curler coaster of financial exercise in current months that it could be shocking if it weren’t mirrored in progress estimates.
Within the case of the UK, that has resulted in an unusually sharp enhance in exports and funding within the first quarter of the 12 months – largely spending on plane, IT gear and equipment, all sectors focused by the US in these early tariff bulletins. In different phrases, it is fairly probably that a lot of this quarter’s GDP represents companies front-running the tariffs, shopping for in equipment and sending out exports to the US forward of the deadlines imposed by the White Home.
If that is certainly a one-off bump, then that means this quarter’s numbers are unlikely to be repeated. And certainly that is the Financial institution of England’s expectation – that underlying financial progress drops again to 0.1% within the coming quarters, removed from “going gangbusters”. Certainly, the Financial institution’s figures look positively dreary.
However this, too, may show to be mistaken. Briefly, the economic system – each domestically and internationally – is about as unpredictable because it has ever been.
