The growing evidence of a V-shaped recovery

A similar phenomenon is developing with the Covid recession as happened with Brexit. News outlets – the BBC in particular – are choosing to focus on dire economic predictions at the expense of more positive real-world data. Yesterday, we heard no end of it when EY forecast that the economy would not reach its pre-Covid size until the end of 2024, 18 months longer than it had previously forecast. Yet where is the coverage today of the CBI’s distributive trades survey, which suggests that retail sales in July have been pretty much back to where they were a year ago, and that car sales are actually up on last July?

The tracker is a survey that asks retailers, quite simply: are you doing more business this year than you were doing last year? For July, 4 per cent more retailers said sales had increased since last year than said sales had fallen.