Pimco chief slams austerity in interview with FT

Bill Gross, manager of the world’s largest bond fund for Pimco and one of the most widely followed and influential voices in the bond market, has attacked the UK’s and Eurozone’s austerity measures, saying that austerity is not the way to induce growth.

Economy to continue flatlining this year

The graph below, produce by Canadian-based bank Scotiabank, shows the evolving nature of GDP forecasts as applied to the UK economy.

As we can see, this is the third consecutive year where the consensus for growth has started out at around 2 per cent before gradually being pushed down towards zero as time has passed.

Manufacturing’s ‘winter of discontent’ continues

Claims by the coalition government that the UK’s beleaguered manufacturing sector is beginning to show signs of recovery were dealt another blow this week by the reliable Markit/CIPS purchasing managers’ index (PMI), which showed that manufacturing contracted in the first quarter of 2013.