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UK Production Stats Mislead

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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A report on UK production for May offered a misleading signal. Data from the Office of National Statistics showed that:

Production rose by 1.0 per cent between April 2012 and May 2012, with manufacturing rising by 1.2 per cent.   But when adjusted for the number of working days in the month, the data continued to point to a recession:

In 2012, the end of May bank holiday was moved to June resulting in an additional working day in May, which may have been a contributing factor to the month on month growth shown in the production and manufacturing sectors.

Even without the move of the holiday from one month to the next, there is not much to cheer economists who watch the UK gross domestic product and employment situations. The Bank of England recently said it would step in to aid the country, which has started to suffer a GDP contraction. Concern is rising that the government’s austerity program has robbed business and consumer confidence.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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