Now I don't know if it was Osborne or the OBR who expected household debt to rise by £300bn from 2014 to 2015 but whoever did so clearly isn't fit to be let anywhere near the public finances.
doesn't exist are reminiscent of Portsmouth council and the Hancock report.
OK, now read the supplementary report/
1. Debt figures are gross not net (at least the column you quoted above); 2. There was a £290 bn one-off uplift in 2010 due to changed methodology (mainly pension related). 3. They include pension contributions, liabilities and assets.
So these figures are 'chalk and cheese' when comparing with the "net debt figures" used by the BoE, ONS and in the main body of the EFO report.
Avery, you have been caught red handed, with your pants down , in clear view AND it was the OBR which caused all the problems.
A better answer would have been that the OBR is nothing better than HMV and Osborne did not come round to instruct them how to publish these figures.
Have Annie Power backed at 5.6 to win and 3.075 to be placed in the world hurdle. Can lay the win bet off (to zero up) but not the place. Wondering whether to lay the win part off and take 4.0 NRNB with 365 ?
*Trying to work out if NRNB is worth a point or more.... I thought she'd be entered for the Worlds but maybe not.
Advice ?
Edit: Worked it out, betting without the NRNB is effectively a multiple - that she enters the race with the first part.
That means that the 4.0 is better value than the 5.6 I think...
Lay off the WH bets. I think she will go for the Champion.
[snip] When I once tried to complain about Betfair, I was referred to the Gibraltar Gambling Commission. It took three months for them to acknowledge my email and I never received a reply to the substance of the complaint. [snip]
If you want to take it further then speak to Albert Isola who is the Minister responsible for gambling. Very approachable chap and a token lefty in a family of right-of-centre lawyers.
His brother Lawrence part-owns Europort which is where most of the gambling companies in Gib are based. In the UK that'd look like a conflict of interest but in a small community like this it happens every day.
I've laid the 5.6 to zero but kept the overly generous place odds - rebacked with 365 at 4.0 for NRNB. It'll only be a small amount of cash, but yes can't wait to see the champion hurdle. In fact if Annie is confirmed I might just show up for that day
Now I don't know if it was Osborne or the OBR who expected household debt to rise by £300bn from 2014 to 2015 but whoever did so clearly isn't fit to be let anywhere near the public finances.
doesn't exist are reminiscent of Portsmouth council and the Hancock report.
OK, now read the supplementary report/
1. Debt figures are gross not net (at least the column you quoted above); 2. There was a £290 bn one-off uplift in 2010 due to changed methodology (mainly pension related). 3. They include pension contributions, liabilities and assets.
So these figures are 'chalk and cheese' when comparing with the "net debt figures" used by the BoE, ONS and in the main body of the EFO report.
Avery, you have been caught red handed, with your pants down , in clear view AND it was the OBR which caused all the problems.
A better answer would have been that the OBR is nothing better than HMV and Osborne did not come round to instruct them how to publish these figures.
Surby
Stick to finding burly policemen.
The OBR did overestimate growth in household debt in the supplementary paper linked by ar, but by nothing like the extent the Guardian claimed once pensions are excluded and the increase in gross debt is restated as a net debt increase.
The OBR may get its economic forecasts wrong - all forecasters do - but they don't publish an EFO and supplementary paper at the same time where the assumptions in each are totally different.
The main sin of the OBR here is in lack of transparency and consistency of presentation not in making fundamentally absurby forecasts.
The real culprit is Toby Helm and The Guardian who didn't do their homework correctly and misinterpreted the statistics and reports.
NRNB is really good for a horse like this, as to back traditionally ante-post is effectively a double. Backed her NRNB for both World and Champion now.
Can't see her in the mares race, she'd trounce Quevega I think and it wouldn't be the best use of her talents.
[snip] When I once tried to complain about Betfair, I was referred to the Gibraltar Gambling Commission. It took three months for them to acknowledge my email and I never received a reply to the substance of the complaint. [snip]
If you want to take it further then speak to Albert Isola who is the Minister responsible for gambling. Very approachable chap and a token lefty in a family of right-of-centre lawyers.
His brother Lawrence part-owns Europort which is where most of the gambling companies in Gib are based. In the UK that'd look like a conflict of interest but in a small community like this it happens every day.
Thanks Geoff.
I've lost interest in it now. (It was to do with the integrity of the Random Number Generators used by Betfair and others for their on-line games, but I no longer play them....partly because of my mistrust of RNGs.) I'll bear it in mind for the future though.
It speaks volumes of course that the internet branches of the major bookies are registered through Gibraltar. Why on earth would they do that, other than to avoid control by the UK Gambling Commission?
[snip] When I once tried to complain about Betfair, I was referred to the Gibraltar Gambling Commission. It took three months for them to acknowledge my email and I never received a reply to the substance of the complaint. [snip]
If you want to take it further then speak to Albert Isola who is the Minister responsible for gambling. Very approachable chap and a token lefty in a family of right-of-centre lawyers.
His brother Lawrence part-owns Europort which is where most of the gambling companies in Gib are based. In the UK that'd look like a conflict of interest but in a small community like this it happens every day.
Thanks Geoff.
I've lost interest in it now. (It was to do with the integrity of the Random Number Generators used by Betfair and others for their on-line games, but I no longer play them....partly because of my mistrust of RNGs.) I'll bear it in mind for the future though.
It speaks volumes of course that the internet branches of the major bookies are registered through Gibraltar. Why on earth would they do that, other than to avoid control by the UK Gambling Commission?
Why wouldn't the RNG be random btw ? If it helps I had a £5 free bet to use on games with Paddy Power. Placed on black 29 and the wonders of a fixed odds poor expected value bet won me £180 !
Sadly Boylesports (free) fiver couldn't do the same trick ;(
[snip] When I once tried to complain about Betfair, I was referred to the Gibraltar Gambling Commission. It took three months for them to acknowledge my email and I never received a reply to the substance of the complaint. [snip]
If you want to take it further then speak to Albert Isola who is the Minister responsible for gambling. Very approachable chap and a token lefty in a family of right-of-centre lawyers.
His brother Lawrence part-owns Europort which is where most of the gambling companies in Gib are based. In the UK that'd look like a conflict of interest but in a small community like this it happens every day.
Thanks Geoff.
I've lost interest in it now. (It was to do with the integrity of the Random Number Generators used by Betfair and others for their on-line games, but I no longer play them....partly because of my mistrust of RNGs.) I'll bear it in mind for the future though.
It speaks volumes of course that the internet branches of the major bookies are registered through Gibraltar. Why on earth would they do that, other than to avoid control by the UK Gambling Commission?
@Peter_the_punter Can I ask which games you were playing btw - were you trying to beat Betfair zero roulette with a system ?
Backgammon.
Most regular players felt that the numbers the Generator came up with were suspect, but it would have been hard to prove. They didn't pass the smell test though - bizarre sequences cropped up with disquieting regularity. I asked about the source of the numbers and the way they were tested. I may as well have asked the office cat.
[snip] When I once tried to complain about Betfair, I was referred to the Gibraltar Gambling Commission. It took three months for them to acknowledge my email and I never received a reply to the substance of the complaint. [snip]
If you want to take it further then speak to Albert Isola who is the Minister responsible for gambling. Very approachable chap and a token lefty in a family of right-of-centre lawyers.
His brother Lawrence part-owns Europort which is where most of the gambling companies in Gib are based. In the UK that'd look like a conflict of interest but in a small community like this it happens every day.
Thanks Geoff.
I've lost interest in it now. (It was to do with the integrity of the Random Number Generators used by Betfair and others for their on-line games, but I no longer play them....partly because of my mistrust of RNGs.) I'll bear it in mind for the future though.
It speaks volumes of course that the internet branches of the major bookies are registered through Gibraltar. Why on earth would they do that, other than to avoid control by the UK Gambling Commission?
Nothing to do with the UK Gambling Commission although that may be a minor side bonus. It is to do with your Random Number Generators and all of the other servers handling gambling traffic.
All of the major (except PP) and most of the minor companies are here. If your servers are here and your company is registered here then you get the local Corporation Tax rate. Which is significantly less than in the UK. As usual; follow the money.
You do have to be here genuinely, though. No brass plates.
[snip] When I once tried to complain about Betfair, I was referred to the Gibraltar Gambling Commission. It took three months for them to acknowledge my email and I never received a reply to the substance of the complaint. [snip]
If you want to take it further then speak to Albert Isola who is the Minister responsible for gambling. Very approachable chap and a token lefty in a family of right-of-centre lawyers.
His brother Lawrence part-owns Europort which is where most of the gambling companies in Gib are based. In the UK that'd look like a conflict of interest but in a small community like this it happens every day.
Thanks Geoff.
I've lost interest in it now. (It was to do with the integrity of the Random Number Generators used by Betfair and others for their on-line games, but I no longer play them....partly because of my mistrust of RNGs.) I'll bear it in mind for the future though.
It speaks volumes of course that the internet branches of the major bookies are registered through Gibraltar. Why on earth would they do that, other than to avoid control by the UK Gambling Commission?
Nothing to do with the UK Gambling Commission although that may be a minor side bonus. It is to do with your Random Number Generators and all of the other servers handling gambling traffic.
All of the major (except PP) and most of the minor companies are here. If your servers are here and your company is registered here then you get the local Corporation Tax rate. Which is significantly less than in the UK. As usual; follow the money.
You do have to be here genuinely, though. No brass plates.
Yes, that makes sense, Geoff.
As I mentioned earlier, the appropriate UK response should be to tax on a 'place of consumption' basis.
The most likely would be poor maintenance, bored programmers messing about with it, hackers or disgruntled ex-employees with mischief or profit-making in mind, cheap kit, glitches, and so on.
The really disquieting thing was that you couldn't find out anything about the company that produced the numbers, let alone its testing and auditing procedures.
And of course in Backgammon, a game with very limited outcomes, it was possible to sense something was wrong. In other games - poker for example - with infinitely more variation it would have been much more difficult to notice anything 'funny'. I've no doubt they use the same RNG in all their games though.
I'd keep away from the lot, at least until the game operators are a bit more open about the way the Generators are tested and audited.
Just discovered tonight that one of Son No2's best friends put 15 quid on a 14 game footie accumulator. First win came in on boxing day, and the last one on Friday in the German league I think, he won over 2 grand!!
Just discovered tonight that one of Son No2's best friends put 15 quid on a 14 game footie accumulator. First win came in on boxing day, and the last one on Friday in the German league I think, he won over 2 grand!!
It scarcely touches the big problems with the major bookmakers though. As Isam has suggested, the real issue is that they contrive to cream profits from games where the punter has no chance at all - like their wretched slot machines - whilst closing down any skill-based gambling. In short, they want mug-punters only. You can hardly blame them, but should a responsible Government be allowing it?
Yes, I have my reservations about P*kerstars' new Zoom feature, which encourages you to sign up for multiple tables and instantly moves you from table to table when you fold. I like to have a low-stakes game going in the background to keep me awake when I'm in a heavy translation, but this is more like the slots experience, with no opportunity to study other players. I also know people with reservations about their RNG - the incidence of quads and unlikled flushes is astonishingly high, encouraging people to hang in there with bad hands, though as you say it's hard to be sure with a complex game.
It's the sort of thing where a responsible industry dealing with basically positive regulators would help. It's a pity, since at modest stakes the whole industry is merely good fun, as we know here.
The backgammon site I used to use had a similar device. In my case it was both unnecessary and ineffective, but credit to them for trying.
It scarcely touches the big problems with the major bookmakers though. As Isam has suggested, the real issue is that they contrive to cream profits from games where the punter has no chance at all - like their wretched slot machines - whilst closing down any skill-based gambling. In short, they want mug-punters only. You can hardly blame them, but should a responsible Government be allowing it?
This is where crypto-currency comes in and changes everything. Properly designed bitcoin gambling games are verifiable: You can see how much money goes in and how much goes out, and everybody (not some toothless regulator in some dodgy place) can verify that they're playing fair.
Not only that, we can cut the bookmakers out of the thing altogether. You can make what are effectively escrow payments, with no middleman holding your money. Not only that, if you can get someone to report the outcome you're betting on and provide a digital signature that the network can read, the network can use that signature to settle the bet. No bookie, nobody holding your funds, nobody except your counterparty even needs to know about your bet.
Now I don't know if it was Osborne or the OBR who expected household debt to rise by £300bn from 2014 to 2015 but whoever did so clearly isn't fit to be let anywhere near the public finances.
ar
As far as I can see, the OBR's forecast of "household debt" does not appear in the main body of its Economic and Fiscal Outlook (EFO) publications made at the time of annual budgets (March) and autumn forecasts (December). Forecasts for household debt are however published in the supplementary tables and data spreadsheets issued at the same time as the EFOs.
In March 2011, the forecast was accompanied by an explanatory document which you linked in your posts (multiple times in a porcine manner).
The source for the baseline "household debt" figure is from a table published in the ONS's quarterly United Kingdom Economic Review (UKEA). The table is A64, "Financial Balance sheet: Households and non-profit institutions serving households" and the data series has the ONS Identifier "NNPP", title "Total Financial Liabilities".
The most up-to-date UKEA at the time the OBR prepared its 2011 March EFO was for 2010 Q3. The baseline outturn figure for 2009 was £1,535 bn, which ends the outturn series from the ONS and begins the OBR forecast series.
The "Total Net Liabilities" series is an aggregate of nine series in three main categories: 'Securities other than shares' (Money Market Instruments, Bonds and Financial Derivatives); 'Loans' (Short term and Long term, subdivided into UK and foreign lenders; secured and unsecured; housing and other); and, 'Other Accounts Payable'. By far the largest category is UK Mortgage Loans at around 70% of the total.
The OBR also publishes a ratio of 'Household Debt' to 'Nominal Household Disposable Income' expressed as a percentage. Outturn Income figures are contained in table A38 of the UKEA under identifier Identifier RPHQ, titled "Households' Gross Disposable Income, Seasonally Adjusted". Household debt at year end is expressed as a percentage of the sum of four calendar quarters of the applicable year.
The explanatory document you linked explains how the OBR models forecast growth in Household Debt. There is not much point in going into the detail here as you have a copy. The points I made last night though remain relevant: that £270 bn of the £600 bn increase derives from a one-off change in calculation methodology in 2010; that the figures reflect changes in pension assets and liabilities (unlike most other published 'Household Debt' figures); and that, the base figure is for gross liabilities with separate series calculated for gross assets and a netted off 'net worth' series.
That said there was clearly a flaw in the model used by the OBR in 2011. I believe this is their assumption that when net disposable income falls, households will resist a reduction in their standard of living by increasing borrowing to compensate for loss of income. Obviously this behaviour partly occurs but nothing like the extent to which they assumed it would in their 2011 forecast.
Another reason why the overly high forecast may not have been picked up by the OBR is that the household debt figures have very little direct bearing on the public finances. This is shown by the fact that they are not stated in the main 180 page EFO. You will rightly argue that the level of household borrowing is an important driver of household consumption and that this in turn determines government direct tax receipts, but there are few key figures with which to cross check the borrowing forecast. Anyone reading the full EFO will see assumptions and figures which make a large increase in household borrowing most unlikely, as shown by the quotes from the EFO I posted last night.
I have now reconciled the forecast made by the OBR in 2011 with outturn figures from the ONS's latest UKEA for Q3 2013. This shows that the OBR overestimated household borrowing by £274 bn (or 15.1%) over four years (1,826 - 1,550). The latest OBR EFO (December 2013) revises the forecast series, with the original 2015 estimate of £2,126 bn not now due to be reached until 2019.
All that remains to be said is that the absurd jumping up and down by Toby Helm and The Guardian in 2011, and, their claims that George Osborne intended to eliminate the public sector defict by increasing household debt could not have been concluded from any proper reading of the OBR documents. It was lazy sensationalism by the journalists involved.
As for Osborne being behind the figures, this is highly unlikely, as the model which produced them was the OBR's alone, was new at the time and its output did not feature in any headline figures or even the text of the published EFO. Like many other aspects of the OBR's work this was no doubt part of their learning curve and is a relatively minor error which is unlikely to repeat. Given all the variables which need calculating to create a five year public finances forecast, a fifteen percent error on a subsidiary imput calculation is not the worst that could or has happened.
[snip] When I once tried to complain about Betfair, I was referred to the Gibraltar Gambling Commission. It took three months for them to acknowledge my email and I never received a reply to the substance of the complaint. [snip]
If you want to take it further then speak to Albert Isola who is the Minister responsible for gambling. Very approachable chap and a token lefty in a family of right-of-centre lawyers.
His brother Lawrence part-owns Europort which is where most of the gambling companies in Gib are based. In the UK that'd look like a conflict of interest but in a small community like this it happens every day.
Thanks Geoff.
I've lost interest in it now. (It was to do with the integrity of the Random Number Generators used by Betfair and others for their on-line games, but I no longer play them....partly because of my mistrust of RNGs.) I'll bear it in mind for the future though.
It speaks volumes of course that the internet branches of the major bookies are registered through Gibraltar. Why on earth would they do that, other than to avoid control by the UK Gambling Commission?
Nothing to do with the UK Gambling Commission although that may be a minor side bonus. It is to do with your Random Number Generators and all of the other servers handling gambling traffic.
All of the major (except PP) and most of the minor companies are here. If your servers are here and your company is registered here then you get the local Corporation Tax rate. Which is significantly less than in the UK. As usual; follow the money.
You do have to be here genuinely, though. No brass plates.
Yes, that makes sense, Geoff.
As I mentioned earlier, the appropriate UK response should be to tax on a 'place of consumption' basis.
My instinct would be not to tax something in the first place, but I guess that shows our different approaches to government.
Interesting point about RNG's, I played around with them many years ago and like many people at the time gave up on them. Surprising as it may seem, the numbers are not really random and are generated by a basic algorithm which unfortunately had the bad habit of regenerating the same series. The trick to using them was to add in a variable like the time ( seconds by minutes by hour by day by month by year) into the calculations. By the time you had to include variables like the weather, emissions from radioactive materials, pulses from stars,etc.etc., it all began to seem a waste of beer time and better to allow the more interested techies to play with it and come up with a better idea.
Comments
A better answer would have been that the OBR is nothing better than HMV and Osborne did not come round to instruct them how to publish these figures.
Why wouldn't she? She's good enough.
His brother Lawrence part-owns Europort which is where most of the gambling companies in Gib are based. In the UK that'd look like a conflict of interest but in a small community like this it happens every day.
We'll see though.
Stick to finding burly policemen.
The OBR did overestimate growth in household debt in the supplementary paper linked by ar, but by nothing like the extent the Guardian claimed once pensions are excluded and the increase in gross debt is restated as a net debt increase.
The OBR may get its economic forecasts wrong - all forecasters do - but they don't publish an EFO and supplementary paper at the same time where the assumptions in each are totally different.
The main sin of the OBR here is in lack of transparency and consistency of presentation not in making fundamentally absurby forecasts.
The real culprit is Toby Helm and The Guardian who didn't do their homework correctly and misinterpreted the statistics and reports.
Can't see her in the mares race, she'd trounce Quevega I think and it wouldn't be the best use of her talents.
I've lost interest in it now. (It was to do with the integrity of the Random Number Generators used by Betfair and others for their on-line games, but I no longer play them....partly because of my mistrust of RNGs.) I'll bear it in mind for the future though.
It speaks volumes of course that the internet branches of the major bookies are registered through Gibraltar. Why on earth would they do that, other than to avoid control by the UK Gambling Commission?
Sadly Boylesports (free) fiver couldn't do the same trick ;(
Backgammon.
Most regular players felt that the numbers the Generator came up with were suspect, but it would have been hard to prove. They didn't pass the smell test though - bizarre sequences cropped up with disquieting regularity. I asked about the source of the numbers and the way they were tested. I may as well have asked the office cat.
All of the major (except PP) and most of the minor companies are here. If your servers are here and your company is registered here then you get the local Corporation Tax rate. Which is significantly less than in the UK. As usual; follow the money.
You do have to be here genuinely, though. No brass plates.
As I mentioned earlier, the appropriate UK response should be to tax on a 'place of consumption' basis.
"Why wouldn't the RNG be random btw ? "
Any of a number of possible reasons.
The most likely would be poor maintenance, bored programmers messing about with it, hackers or disgruntled ex-employees with mischief or profit-making in mind, cheap kit, glitches, and so on.
The really disquieting thing was that you couldn't find out anything about the company that produced the numbers, let alone its testing and auditing procedures.
And of course in Backgammon, a game with very limited outcomes, it was possible to sense something was wrong. In other games - poker for example - with infinitely more variation it would have been much more difficult to notice anything 'funny'. I've no doubt they use the same RNG in all their games though.
I'd keep away from the lot, at least until the game operators are a bit more open about the way the Generators are tested and audited.
Nite all.
It scarcely touches the big problems with the major bookmakers though. As Isam has suggested, the real issue is that they contrive to cream profits from games where the punter has no chance at all - like their wretched slot machines - whilst closing down any skill-based gambling. In short, they want mug-punters only. You can hardly blame them, but should a responsible Government be allowing it?
Yes, I have my reservations about P*kerstars' new Zoom feature, which encourages you to sign up for multiple tables and instantly moves you from table to table when you fold. I like to have a low-stakes game going in the background to keep me awake when I'm in a heavy translation, but this is more like the slots experience, with no opportunity to study other players. I also know people with reservations about their RNG - the incidence of quads and unlikled flushes is astonishingly high, encouraging people to hang in there with bad hands, though as you say it's hard to be sure with a complex game.
It's the sort of thing where a responsible industry dealing with basically positive regulators would help. It's a pity, since at modest stakes the whole industry is merely good fun, as we know here.
Not only that, we can cut the bookmakers out of the thing altogether. You can make what are effectively escrow payments, with no middleman holding your money. Not only that, if you can get someone to report the outcome you're betting on and provide a digital signature that the network can read, the network can use that signature to settle the bet. No bookie, nobody holding your funds, nobody except your counterparty even needs to know about your bet.
Speaking of which, I made this, which may be useful for this purpose among others:
http://www.coindesk.com/reality-keys-bitcoins-third-party-guarantor-contracts/
Perhaps Avery could put these household debt predictions in a yellow box when he's recovered from his 'false meme' humiliation:
2010 £1560 bn
2011 £1628 bn
2012 £1712 bn
2013 £1826 bn
2014 £1963 bn
2015 £2126 bn
Now I don't know if it was Osborne or the OBR who expected household debt to rise by £300bn from 2014 to 2015 but whoever did so clearly isn't fit to be let anywhere near the public finances.
ar
As far as I can see, the OBR's forecast of "household debt" does not appear in the main body of its Economic and Fiscal Outlook (EFO) publications made at the time of annual budgets (March) and autumn forecasts (December). Forecasts for household debt are however published in the supplementary tables and data spreadsheets issued at the same time as the EFOs.
In March 2011, the forecast was accompanied by an explanatory document which you linked in your posts (multiple times in a porcine manner).
The source for the baseline "household debt" figure is from a table published in the ONS's quarterly United Kingdom Economic Review (UKEA). The table is A64, "Financial Balance sheet: Households and non-profit institutions serving households" and the data series has the ONS Identifier "NNPP", title "Total Financial Liabilities".
The most up-to-date UKEA at the time the OBR prepared its 2011 March EFO was for 2010 Q3. The baseline outturn figure for 2009 was £1,535 bn, which ends the outturn series from the ONS and begins the OBR forecast series.
The "Total Net Liabilities" series is an aggregate of nine series in three main categories: 'Securities other than shares' (Money Market Instruments, Bonds and Financial Derivatives); 'Loans' (Short term and Long term, subdivided into UK and foreign lenders; secured and unsecured; housing and other); and, 'Other Accounts Payable'. By far the largest category is UK Mortgage Loans at around 70% of the total.
The OBR also publishes a ratio of 'Household Debt' to 'Nominal Household Disposable Income' expressed as a percentage. Outturn Income figures are contained in table A38 of the UKEA under identifier Identifier RPHQ, titled "Households' Gross Disposable Income, Seasonally Adjusted". Household debt at year end is expressed as a percentage of the sum of four calendar quarters of the applicable year.
[to be continued ...]
[...continued]
The explanatory document you linked explains how the OBR models forecast growth in Household Debt. There is not much point in going into the detail here as you have a copy. The points I made last night though remain relevant: that £270 bn of the £600 bn increase derives from a one-off change in calculation methodology in 2010; that the figures reflect changes in pension assets and liabilities (unlike most other published 'Household Debt' figures); and that, the base figure is for gross liabilities with separate series calculated for gross assets and a netted off 'net worth' series.
That said there was clearly a flaw in the model used by the OBR in 2011. I believe this is their assumption that when net disposable income falls, households will resist a reduction in their standard of living by increasing borrowing to compensate for loss of income. Obviously this behaviour partly occurs but nothing like the extent to which they assumed it would in their 2011 forecast.
Another reason why the overly high forecast may not have been picked up by the OBR is that the household debt figures have very little direct bearing on the public finances. This is shown by the fact that they are not stated in the main 180 page EFO. You will rightly argue that the level of household borrowing is an important driver of household consumption and that this in turn determines government direct tax receipts, but there are few key figures with which to cross check the borrowing forecast. Anyone reading the full EFO will see assumptions and figures which make a large increase in household borrowing most unlikely, as shown by the quotes from the EFO I posted last night.
I have now reconciled the forecast made by the OBR in 2011 with outturn figures from the ONS's latest UKEA for Q3 2013. This shows that the OBR overestimated household borrowing by £274 bn (or 15.1%) over four years (1,826 - 1,550). The latest OBR EFO (December 2013) revises the forecast series, with the original 2015 estimate of £2,126 bn not now due to be reached until 2019.
[to be continued...]
[continued...]
The following yellow box sets out the figures: All that remains to be said is that the absurd jumping up and down by Toby Helm and The Guardian in 2011, and, their claims that George Osborne intended to eliminate the public sector defict by increasing household debt could not have been concluded from any proper reading of the OBR documents. It was lazy sensationalism by the journalists involved.
As for Osborne being behind the figures, this is highly unlikely, as the model which produced them was the OBR's alone, was new at the time and its output did not feature in any headline figures or even the text of the published EFO. Like many other aspects of the OBR's work this was no doubt part of their learning curve and is a relatively minor error which is unlikely to repeat. Given all the variables which need calculating to create a five year public finances forecast, a fifteen percent error on a subsidiary imput calculation is not the worst that could or has happened.
Yet another Guardian created 'false meme' I fear.
Looks like they're still looking.