No Britain, You Cannot Have an Olympics Every Quarter Even If . . .

They Are the Only Thing That Caused Economic Growth For the Past Five Quarters

[Update:  In an incredible statement the economic spokesperson for Fidelity said this.

"The more time that passes, the clearer it is that America's gradual and delayed approach to fiscal tightening is the right one," said Trevor Greetham of the investment group Fidelity. 

Wow, and it only took four years.]

The GDP for Britain for the 4^th Quarter Has just been released and guess what everybody, it is negative.  Ok, not a hard guess since British economic policy imposed by Conservatives has been an anti-growth policy.  Here is the chart showing British quarterly changes in GDP for the past four years.  Yeah that one quarter where it was positive did coincide with the Olympics.

How has the British government reacted.  Well, Chancellor George Osborne, a hard line Conservative who is the driving force in current British economic policy says he will confront the problem.

Britain’s economy shrank 0.3 per cent in the final quarter of last year, bringing it closer to a possible “triple-dip” recession and piling pressure on the coalition government.

Chancellor George Osborne, whose austerity programme has come under increasing criticism as the economy has faltered, said he would “confront” the UK’s problems and not “run away” in response to the data, which was worse than economists had predicted.

which many people might regard as admirable except for the fact that the main reason the problem exists is because of Mr. Osborne’s policies.

What happened to the nice recovery that was occurring in late 2009 and 2010?  Oh yes, British voters voted to put the Conservative party in power.  That's all the explanation really needed.

In the meantime have the dismal results in Britain, along with even more dismal results in Ireland, Portugal, Greece and Spain made any difference in the beliefs of Europeans leaders who have implemented this insanity?  No, of course not.  Eventually the economies of these countries will improve and at that time the leadership can declare vindication.  Much the same way a weather forecaster who always predicts rain the Sahara will be vindicated on the one day in five years it actually does rain.