UK Slips Into Double-Dip Recession

Foreshadowing?

Britain's economy slid into its second recession since the financial crisis after official data unexpectedly showed a fall in output in the first three months of 2012, piling pressure on Prime Minister David Cameron's embattled coalition government.

The Office for National Statistics said Britain's gross domestic product fell 0.2 percent in the first quarter of 2012 after contracting by 0.3 percent at the end of 2011, confounding forecasts for 0.1 percent growth.

The contraction was prefigured by a huge fall in construction activity.

I don't know if this campaign line works, but I've been thinking Romney could say something like: "Barack Obama has been trusting Europe to pull us out of recession. But we've never counted on Europe to pull the world out of recession before -- America has always been the engine. This time, we're counting on weaker economies to pull us out of recession instead of doing the job ourselves, and it's having predictable consequences."

That's very first-draft. But the basic idea is to tie together four different things -- Obama's passivity, Obama's disregard for America's position as the Indispensable Nation, his overfondness of European socialism as an economic model, and of course his miserable failure.

posted by Ace at 11:53 AM

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