Coming this week - new disaster blockbuster

DISASTER movies have long been out of fashion. You would need to be pushing 40 to remember the heyday of Airport 75, Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure.

But an enterprising scriptwriter planning to revive the genre could find all the materials needed in a report out this week. The nerve-wracking official data covers credit, house prices and the trade gap.

The film's working title would be Platform Of Stability, which the dedicated reader(s) of the Chancellor's speeches will immediately recognise as one of Gordon Brown's phrases of the moment.

An all-star cast would be trapped on a large island in the north Atlantic. Despite a gush of hubristic booster-talk from the island's proprietors ('Take a look at that!', 'Isn't she something?' and so on), it will soon become apparent that the platform of stability isn't so stable after all.

Will they get off before it tips into the sea? Well, the Hollywood stars will probably make it. The rest of us may well be bobbing around in the drink, wondering what went wrong.

Could it happen for real? This week's evidence will not be reassuring. The May figures for bank and mortgage lending will make interesting reading.

Though the consumer boom may finally be ebbing, credit demand always has some extra momentum with 'distress' borrowing picking up the slack as the economy slows.

As for mortgage lending, the most recent Nationwide index showed prices rising at 19% a year. By happy chance, there is a new Nationwide survey on Friday. It may disclose a new sobriety in the housing market, but don't bet on it.

Then there are the first-quarter balance of payment figures, also due on Friday. The good news? Our income from overseas investments - a net zero in the fourth quarter of 2001 - is expected to have been a little healthier this time round.

The bad news? Our deficit on trade in goods is still running at about £8 billion a quarter, with a surplus on trade in services of about £3 billion coming nowhere near closing the gap. In other words, we continue to enjoy a standard of living we have not earned.

But then, gross domestic product figures, also out on Friday, are expected to confirm that the economy did not grow at all during the first quarter of this year, having been flat in the last quarter of 2001.

To sum up, the platform of stability amounts to zero growth, a credit boom, an uncontrollable houseprice spiral and an enormous balance of payments deficit.

We can only be thankful, if this is stability, that Labour Treasury ministers did not set out to bring a little excitement and uncertainty to their management of the economy.

Most unfair, their defenders may say. Other economies have similar problems. Quite right. For example, the Federal Reserve Board, the US central bank, meets on Tuesday and Wednesday. It is torn between increasing interest rates to choke off looming inflation (house prices are soaring even in the Big Country) and cutting them to pep up Wall Street.

And if the Fed is in a pickle, Europe's central bankers are stewing in an extra-hot lime, chilli and mango chutney as they struggle to find one interest rate that will deal simultaneously with rising inflation, high unemployment and the imminent bankruptcy of at least one small eurozone member.

So why pick on Britain? No reason at all, other than to help snap the consumer out of the hypnosis induced by prolonged exposure to mesmerising rhetoric of the platform of stability variety.

That Middle Britain has been sporting enough to hock itself to the eyeballs to pay for Labour's economic 'miracle' is itself little short of miraculous, and says a great deal for the excessive confidence induced by repetitive 'stability' talk. But even without the efforts of we stability sceptics, that confidence is on the wane.

A combination of short and long-term factors - whether next year's one percentage point rise in National Insurance or the looming pensions crisis - is sending a big chill through the ranks of the consuming classes.

This, you will be told, is all according to plan - consumer behaviour moderates and the economy returns to balance.

There are just two quibbles with that rose-tinted outlook. First, the notion of 'the consumer' as a single entity that will see its best interests and follow them is from the same stable of non-winners as pay freezes in the Seventies. It is also marred by the same fatal flaw - an individual may well behave in that sensible way, but tens of millions, acting individually, tend not to.

And, they may well ask, why should they? As there is no instant way of checking that everyone else is playing the game, it makes sense for individuals to pursue their own self-interest - while the party lasts.

Thus the rebalancing act is inevitably more painful than predicted.

Second, why the need to rebalance in the first place? Is it being suggested that the platform of stability was unbalanced? Surely not.