I'm going to quote again, and forgive me, because I read huge amounts and I have guests speakers coming in. I had Philip Cross out—a very senior statistician for 35 years—to my class on this very question of investment. He said, if you want to know how the economy is going to be doing in about three years from now, look at aggregate private capital investment today, because that's the investment in the factories, the equipment and the technologies that are going to produce the jobs, but there's a lag from the time you start the investment to the time you build it and you get it up and running.
It's a very useful metric for MPs to say, let's look at aggregate private capital investment today, and we'll have a pretty good idea how the economy is going to be doing in about three years with a lag of three years.
When you have a deficit and the investment is going down, as it's doing, this a very bad sign because it means we're building fewer businesses with less investment in the future. In fact, all of the studies on productivity are showing that we're massively underinvesting on worker trainer, R and D, and capex in our businesses, relative to the U.S. There's no mystery to the productivity crisis.