UK unemployment rate drops to 7.1%

[suityou01]

Ride that wave!

Cowabunga dude.

It must be election time soon.

[Flashman]

Cowabunga dude.

It must be election time soon.

yup 18 months to fill the war chest with dosh before the bubble bursts. Said Chancellor Osborne.

[xoggoth]

This is not a success story.

Don't disagree that this recovery is too much about the people spending more but there are improvement in our manufacturing sector:

Growth in new manufacturing orders was the strongest since April 2011, according to the latest CBI quarterly Industrial Trends Survey | Western Morning News

However anyone who thinks it would be better under Labour, with Ed "we need to invest in the public sector" Balls as chancellor is seriously deluded. If they think socialist policies are good for an economy maybe they should go to France, oh no maybe not.

[SpontaneousOrder]

[Flashman]

Don't disagree that this recovery is too much about the people spending more but there are improvement in our manufacturing sector:

Growth in new manufacturing orders was the strongest since April 2011, according to the latest CBI quarterly Industrial Trends Survey | Western Morning News

However anyone who thinks it would be better under Labour, with Ed "we need to invest in the public sector" Balls as chancellor is seriously deluded. If they think socialist policies are good for an economy maybe they should go to France, oh no maybe not.

Anyone who thinks anything much will change after the election is seriously deluded. Different faces. Same Government.

[shaunbhoy]

Anyone who thinks anything much will change after the election is seriously deluded. Different faces. Same Government.

Exactly. Whoever you vote for the Government always gets in!!

[AtW]

So it would be better if unemployment went up?

Yes, if it was MPs who became unemployed.

[scooterscot]

Don't disagree that this recovery is too much about the people spending more but there are improvement in our manufacturing sector:

Growth in new manufacturing orders was the strongest since April 2011, according to the latest CBI quarterly Industrial Trends Survey | Western Morning News

However anyone who thinks it would be better under Labour, with Ed "we need to invest in the public sector" Balls as chancellor is seriously deluded. If they think socialist policies are good for an economy maybe they should go to France, oh no maybe not.

I might share those sentiments were it not for the thought in the back of my mind that too many UK manufacturing companies are nothing of the sort but but foreign own entities exporting as many profits as they're exports.

We might mock France, but consider it's a French company propping the manufacturing Fracking effort in the north.

[Zero Liability]

When did they start high? The price of houses over the last 30 years have increased by at least double the increase in M2 money supply.

One thing I wonder is whether these figures are massaged in the same way as the US ones are, i.e. improvements due to those who become long-term 'discouraged' from looking for work completely falling out of the labour force, pushing the numbers up favourably. It's also interesting to look at the composition of jobs, e.g. shifts from full time to part time/zero hour contracts etc, sectors that are driving the fall in unemployment (as the OP did; none of the ones at the top are particularly promising) and so on. The aggregate figure is very useful for concealing an economy that may still be under-performing in significant ways.

Even a pick up in manufacturing activity and the PMI isn't necessarily a good sign if the activity is driven by an ultra-low interest rate environment and other forms of inflationary finance (on a global scale, as inevitably this will seep into the UK as well.)

[darmstadt]

It may have gone down but the youth unemployment figures are at their highest since 1993 with nearly 950,000 unemployed and over 200,000 of those for more than a year.