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Deloitte’s Ian Stewart: ‘Controlling costs and balance sheets will be the top-two concerns. There will be a focus on resilience – not just a business’s own resilience but exposure to third-party risk’


Consumers face squeeze ‘worse’ than 2008 crisis


Deloitte economist predicts impact of UK economic slowdown. Ian Taylor reports He added: “The big concern has


The UK is heading for recession and rising unemployment and the squeeze on consumers will “probably be much worse” than following the 2008 financial crisis. That is according to Deloitte UK


chief economist Ian Stewart who told the European Hotel Investment Conference in London last week: “We expect a recession. It will be the third in 14 years and the most-semaphored recession in history. “Inflation is at its highest since


the early 1980s and we tend to get recessions around peaks in inflation.


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The last two recessions – the pandemic and the financial crisis – were unusual for not being marked by inflation.” Stewart argued: “Central banks


are trying to engineer big slowdowns. A major driver of the post-pandemic slowdown has been labour shortages. Now it will be rising interest rates. After the government’s mini-Budget [in October], we expected UK interest rates to be over 6% by the middle of next year. Now we expect them to be 4%. [But] that will be a big issue in terms of funding. The climate of easy capital is changing.”


been short-term labour shortages, but the Bank of England wants to weaken the labour market. I would suggest we’ll see a turn in the labour market in the next few months. Unemployment is always low on the eve of a recession and tends to be high at the end of it. “The labour market is going to be


different to what we’ve come to know. It’s going to be more challenging. “The squeeze on consumers


Continued on page 54 travelweekly.co.uk


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