Beware the 'FT recession'

Ross Walker, the chief economist at RBS, has a novel way of looking at the British economy. The early 1980s, he told the PPA Magazines 2008 conference at the Grosvenor House hotel today, was a Daily Mirror recession. This is because it hit the manufacturing sector and other blue collar workers, ie Mirror readers, hard. The early 1990s was the Daily Mail recession, because of the housing market crash - it hit the middle classes hard. Now we face what he calls a Financial Times recession, which is hitting the City. So the rest of us will be alright then? Not quite. "It would be nice to think so but these areas are now the lifeblood of the economy," says Walker. Oh well, it hasn't exactly harmed the FT's circulation. Yet.