Flying Blind

As London burns with angry lefties, Anatole Kaletsky fisks the OECD forecasts:

In November, the OECD believed that the GDP of its member countries would decline by a very moderate 0.4 per cent in 2009; today that has been revised to an unprecedented collapse of 4.3 per cent. In November the OECD and the IMF said that Britain would be the weakest of the leading economies; but today the OECD predicts that Britain will do better than any other major economy, apart from Canada and France. In November, the OECD believed that Japan and Germany would escape more or less unscathed from the recession, with declines of less than 1 per cent in GDP; today it predicts that Germany's GDP will plunge by 5.6 per cent and Japan's by 6.6 per cent.

(Photo: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty.)