Thursday, April 9, 2009

UK external sector - a huge deficit that refuses to narrow

The UK external accounts continue to record huge deficits. In February, the deficit in goods and services was £3.2 billion in February, compared with the deficit of £3.1 billion in January.

The huge sterling deficit has done nothing to improve UK export performance. In fact, export earnings have fallen every month since October last year.

2 comments:

  1. The gross figures don't give much useful information. What is the hydrocarbons position? What about food? We import lots of food, and we sure as hell can't stop eating. And tourism was an outflow for years, perhaps it won't be this year, but we won't know for a while yet. Plenty of spam from airlines just now, so I guess they struggling to fill the planes.

    Its too early to tell what the trend of trade balances is going to be in the post financial services, lead sterling era.

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  2. Those comments I pasted to you from Ajay are sounding remarkably prescient, nay ???

    I suppose the acid test for his prediction is that he's sitting on 20m quid and you and I are not.

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