UK GDP Stages Surprise .5% Drop

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published

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UK GDP was down .5% in the fourth quarter of 2010. The drop was not expected and indicates that as the nation enters a period of austerity its fortunes are unlikely to be aided by a rise in tax receipts

The Office for National Statistics reported that

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) decreased by 0.5 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2010, compared with an increase of 0.7 per cent in the previous quarter. The GDP estimate was significantly affected by the bad weather in December; more analysis is provided in the bulletin. The decline in the fourth quarter is due to decreases in two of the component aggregate series, namely services and construction.

 

The data is likely to unsettle global capital markets investors who might think the the European region economy might recover soon. It also undermines forecasts of improvement in global GDP just issued by the IMF

Douglas A. McIntyre

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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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