Greece: party like it’s 1999

The Economist estimates how far back the GFC has set various economies:

They’ve used GDP, consumption, wages, stockmarket indices, house prices, wealth and unemployment to calculate that single index. I really like the concept as a way of showing the effect of the crisis to people who aren’t familiar with macroeconomic statistics, but I wonder how they managed to combine that lot without double counting. The Economist Intelligence Unit has certainly not been immune to criticism of its indicators in the past, with Chris Auld calling their Liveability Index “…an arbitrarily weighted sum of arbitrary measures which can neither be meaningfully summed nor measured.” So, I like the concept, but I’d take the actual numbers with a grain of salt until we can see the methodology.