Rare Good News As The Misery Index Dips - But There's A Long Way To Go

19th September 2022

Article by by David Smith, economist.

My regular column is available to subscribers on www.thetimes.co.uk This is an excerpt. Not to be reproduced without permission. Link to the full article further down.

There has been some rare good news on the economy in recent days. Inflation fell for the first time since September last year, dipping from 10.1 to 9.9 per cent last month and ending a series of upside surprises. The unemployment rate also fell, from 3.8 to 3.6 per cent, pretty much as close to full employment as you can get, and the lowest since mid-1974. I shall dig a little deeper into the unemployment fall a little later, including a technical explanation of why it might have happened.

The misery index, invented by the late Arthur Okun, an eminent American economist, has thus fallen for the first time in a long while. It is the combination of the unemployment and inflation rates, and so is fractionally lower than a month ago but much higher than this time last year and, indeed for many months before that.

Read the full article HERE