City pours scorn on Treasury growth forecasts - papers

Despite being forced to downgrade his growth expectations for this year to show a 3.5% drop in gross domestic product, Alistair Darling said he expected the UK to start expanding again by the end of the year and record a 1.25% expansion next year. But the chancellor was accused of being over-optimistic in his anticipation that a mini-investment boom and the boost to exports from a weaker pound would lead to growth of 3.5% in 2011 and continue to grow at 3%-plus in the next two years. Darling told MPs that the 1.6% contraction in the economy in the final three months of 2008 would be rep...