Economics for Gui-d’oh Fawkes

Guido Fawkes claims that "the only member country of the G20 still in recession is the UK." But it's not true: five G20 countries are still in recession.

On his blog, Guido has an article showing a venn diagram of G20 countries. He claims that:

“The big circle shows the all 20 members of the G20, the left-hand set comprises those members who are out of recession, the small right hand set contains those countries still in recession.  This is one chart you won’t see on Will Straw’s Left Foot Forward…

“Embarrassingly for Gordon Brown, who sees himself as financial saviour and leader of the world, the only member country of the G20 still in recession is the UK.”

Now Left Foot Forward is aware that it must be doing something right if it has become a target of Guido’s fire but we couldn’t possibly stand by and let something so inaccurate pass without comment.

The ‘Output, prices, and jobs‘ section of this week’s Economist clearly shows that there are at least five G20 countries still in recession: Britain, Canada, Mexico, South Africa, and Russia. Spain, who attend G20 meetings, are also still in recession.

Indeed, the Economist data suggest that only Australia, China, India, Indonesia, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia recorded positive growth (year-on-year) in the quarter for which data is most recently available.

Left Foot Forward tried to point out the error of Guido’s ways on his blog but our comment had not yet been published as we went to press. Perhaps Guido doesn’t like the truth.

UPDATE 17.17

While we’re on the subject, take a look at this graph of unemployment across the G20. It shows where the UK lies in relation to unemployment. Source: Bloomberg.

UPDATE 18.08

Left Foot Forward believes in evidence and we’re happy to concede when someone else has better evidence than we do. It turns out that Guido was more up-to-date so we’re happy to eat a little humble pie (and remove the Guido’s dunce cap). Comments are closed on this post.

24 Responses to “Economics for Gui-d’oh Fawkes”

  1. Will Straw

    Have a laugh at Gui-d'oh Fawkes and his misunderstanding of economic data http://bit.ly/4QzLne

  2. Hadleigh Roberts

    RT @wdjstraw: Have a laugh at Gui-d'oh Fawkes and his misunderstanding of economic data http://bit.ly/4QzLne

  3. James

    Are you reading those figures correctly?

    I think are looking at the wrong column when you state that only 6 countries are experiencing positive growth. The first column compares to the same quarter last year – whereas the second column show growth on qtr – which demonstrates the Eurozone is growing again.

Comments are closed.