ECONOMY WATCH..

  

Who knows where the UK economy is heading?

Public sector employment is falling.  That is, in the main, a good thing.  From where I sit - and it is an educated and informed position - the people I've seen losing jobs in the public sector in the past year or two have been well deserved recruits to the dole lines.  The really good ones, the committed individuals, are still there or left in frustration some years ago.

I wouldn't employ many of the recent redundancies let's put it that way.  These are the people who could never quite grasp that the rest of the world wasn't full of 'training days', extended leave periods for illness and the like.  Almost every email to one of these people would get an instant auto-response saying, "sorry I am out of the office until x and will not be receiving my emails...'

But private sector employment took a hit at the beginning of the recession.  And it hasn't picked itself up yet.  Not even to fill the drop in employment from two years ago let alone to create new jobs for all those useful public sector people now sat at home [at this point the reader should not get unduly concerned for their welfare as many of these people are sat on bundles of (our) cash from very attractive redundancy payments let alone the promise of their cosy public sector, final salary pensions kicking in].

So, here's what the graph looks like with some historical perspective...

Who knows where that line is going to turn - up or down?

In short, nobody.