Be careful with economic stats. A quick thread.
The ONS are an excellent organisation. They’ve done some superb & timely work on different aspects of Covid-19.
But, as they rightly acknowledge, everyone now needs to be very careful with all of their headline stats.

The lockdown, followed by rapidly changing consumption patterns raises serious questions about their inflation data. I wrote about this in April. https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.economist.com/britain/2020/04/25/the-impossibility-of-measuring-inflation-in-a-pandemic

The unemployment measures have big issues too. There’s an excellent report from @resfoundation today: https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/press-releases/headline-unemployment-measures-are-failing-to-show-the-true-extent-of-britains-jobs-crisis/ Or look at the ONS’s own commentary today.

The GDP stats face all sorts of issues, not least that filling out forms for statisticians is pretty low down firms’ priority lists right now. The ONS put out a paper on this in May. https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/uksectoraccounts/articles/coronavirusandtheeffectsonukgdp/2020-05-06 and the latest release had this caveat.

So just be even more careful than normal with all these numbers.
Confident predictions about the economic future are always a bit silly. But especially right now when we aren’t even sure what is happening in the present and near past.