According to the media, the great recession that began in 2008 is now over: the UK economy is supposed to have returned to the levels it reached that year. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) has revised its GDP growth predictions for 2014 upwards from 2.5% to 2.9%, and said that the economy will reach its pre-recession peak in a few months. Predictions also show that unemployment will fall close to 6% by 2015 and inflation will remain close to its 2% target. The director of the NIESR, Jonathan Portes, has claimed that it is "important symbolically that the economy is, or will very shortly be, bigger than it was in 2008".
The trouble is that the financial crisis and everything that we should have learned from it risks being washed away in a rising tide of economic optimism.
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