Are we heading for a major economic slump?

Now, the latest economic news is bad, if I'm honest.

UK wage growth is now non-existent, actually.

We've already gone through the longest squeeze in wages ever recorded in modern history

in the period of the last 20 years overall.

The unemployment rate rise is also there. In the US,

inflation, things are going upwards in terms of prices all over again. Obviously, we already

had massive inflationary pressures, which caused huge political consequences. This is all partly

linked, of course, to the Iran War, but the global economy

was not in a good place anyway, with huge red lights flashing. I'm really delighted to be

joined by James Meadray, a brilliant economist, to work out, are we heading for a slump? How bad

is this? Where are things potentially going? Hello, how you doing? Hello, not too bad other than

that very bleak introduction. That was not the, the cheeriest way to start a discussion, was it,

Owen? No, we've got to work with what we got, though. I should also say, by the way,

check out Macrodose, a brilliant economics podcast, which James presents. Yeah, it's bleak. How bad is it? Let's look at Britain.

How bad is the latest data? Well, it's one of those ones where it's already quite bad and

it sort of gets worse a bit. The rise is unemployment, it's being built as unexpected. It probably

shouldn't have been that unexpected because what you can start to

see happening now is, I mean, the starting point for this is probably the Iran War, and in particular,

the Strait-Hormuz getting blockaded, through which, as everyone now knows, you know, 20%, 25% the

world's oil and gas flows, importantly also about a third of the world's fertilizer, which is worth bearing in mind

for what's going to happen in the future. That started to force up prices, which already,

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