NPR. This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong here today with Ilya

Maritz, a longtime public radio reporter now based in London. Hello, Ilya.

Hey, Waylon.

So I have rhetorical question for you, and really, it's a rhetorical question for your adopted country.

You okay, UK?

Whelan.

Grown.

And yes, that's a really good question.

You are correct to ask that question because the UK economy is looking a little queasy right now. First, there was an IMF report saying the Iran War would hit UK growth hard. They later revised it up just a little. Then UK government borrowing costs hit a 28-year high. And then there was the news that a million young people are out of work.

There is a rising sense of impatience here. Have you noticed they keep changing prime ministers, 6 p.ms in 10 years?

So if the citizens keep thinking that we're going to fix it in 18 months, and if you don't fix in 18 months, we'll just get a new leader. That's a problem because it's not reasonable to expect that we can fix these problems so quickly.

The current Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, could soon face a leadership challenge from within his own party.

Today on the show, a lot of advanced economies are feeling the stress of the Iran war with higher prices

for oil and gas.

But is the UK the country we should be worrying about?

I brought all those negative headlines about the British economy to Helen Miller.

She is the director of a think tank, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, IFS. And she told me

these stories can be overwhelming. So it helps to look at them as symptoms of a single underlying

issue. If there's one big picture thing that's happening in the UK, I think it's low growth.

For many years now, the extent to which the economy is growing has been much lower than it was, you know, in prior decades. And that is underlying a lot of the government's problems. It's why it's hard to run the public finances because, you know, we have a big debt pile. It's hard to pay off that debt if you haven't got a growing economy. It's hard to get people into work if the economy's not growing healthily. So I think underlying a lot of these things is just the problem of low growth.

How long has the UK been in a low growth place?

I think he wanted to put a mark on the chart. You would start around the great financial crisis.

...