As the headlines are dominated by the Labor Party's victory in the UK elections yesterday, Chris Giles (the Financial Times Economics Editor) marks the occasion by a look ahead at the British economy:
Almost everyone accepts economic performance over the first two Labour terms was good. Growth has been stable; the employment rate has risen; inflation has been low; and the public finances have been relatively sound... Britain is now regarded as the healthy man of Europe...
Economists, however, fear the next four years, while not bad, will not be easy as the past eight.
Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, for example, sees the environment as a little less favourable. Last October he said that what he called the "nice decade" from the mid 1990s - non-inflationary consistently expansionary - would now be followed by a "not-so-bad decade" - not of the same order but also desirable...
If growth continues at around 2.5 per cent a year and inflation remains under control, the record will seem very positive, according to Ray Barrell of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research...
There are many potential thorns in this rosy scenario, however, which risk blighting labour's economic record over the next Labour term, even if they do not damage the overall growth record.
If the economy is to rebalance away from consumer spending to investment and net exports, voters will not feel living standards have risen as fast as in recent years.
The housing boom seems to have come to an end, removing one prop of consumer expenditure growth and dampening the feel-good factor.
Taxes have to rise to close the government's budget deficit...
Britain benefited from a sharp rise in its export prices relative to import prices since 2000, a move that contributed to the feeling that incomes were rising fast, and a similar move is by no means certain in the next few years.
"There are shades of 1992 about the economy now," said Danny Gabay of Fathom Consulting. "Consumers are facing a much more difficult period ahead".
And some economists think that if the consumer hits the buffers in the years to come, other parts of the economy will struggle to compensate, leading to slower growth and higher unemployment.
"The economy is unlikely to grow at trend and the Bank of England may be unable to meet its inflation target without the economy falling to recession," Andrew Smithers, of Smithers & Co concluded in a recent note.
Of course, when pushed, all economic forecasters - with the exception of the chancellor - admit that they cannot see into the future. "Time will only tell", they say about the years to come.
That conclusion reveals nothing. More significant is that a large number are willing to bet that the next four years will feel worse than the recent past.
Here's what I read. A list of things that could go wrong, nothing much on what could go right. Are the experts talking themselves into weaker forecasts without without much objective reason to support them?