The UK has a poor investment record. According to IMF data, we have come seventh out of the top seven industrialised countries since 1999.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The U.K. has to keep investing in new technology, skills, and infrastructure to keep pace with international competition.
Britain is one of the world's most open economies. More dependent on trade than any other major country. Our success depends on our competitiveness and our competitiveness depends on raising our productivity, as our competitors are raising theirs.
The economic situation, the high cost of undertaking manufacturing, the supply chain - which is, by the way, dying out also as manufacturing undergoes hardship - make the U.K. not the first place you would look at to make a manufacturing investment.
You know the illusion of the cheap money is over and now Britain has to go out there and graft and earn its way and create wealth and prosperity in a very competitive world.
We have sectors of the economy, aerospace is a good example, where Britain's probably the second country in the world, the automobile sector, where we've done extraordinarily well, an enormous amount of investment over the last couple of years, life sciences is another.
Housing associations have fingered the fact that they cannot use their assets as liquidity due to Bank of England rules unlike their continental equivalents. This has emerged to be one of the main bottlenecks to getting investment going in the U.K. It is a Bank of England issue.
While U.K. is one of India's most important trade and investment partners, India has become one of the largest investors in the U.K.
The U.K. and almost all of Europe have erred in terms of believing that austerity, fiscal austerity in the short term, is the way to produce real growth. It is not. You've got to spend money.
Unlike many of its European neighbors, Britain shares many of America's financial traits.
I think you can look at the British economy with confidence.