Imagine. The budget goes down badly in the markets, producing a big bond market sell-off and the threat of a downgrade from rating agencies.

A sombre prime minister broadcasts to the nation, explaining the need for austerity. Public-sector workers and students take to the streets. It does not reassure investors or head off a downgrade. The country is gripped by a fiscal crisis.

That is the kind of thing that has been happening in Greece in recent weeks and spreading to Portugal and Spain. Is it in store for the next British government?

The Greek question is important in its own right but also for other countries that have large deficits. "Nobody is suggesting we are going to follow Greece," Philip Hammond, the shadow Treasury chief secretary, said last week, only to be contradicted by George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, who said Britain was "facing a Greek-style crisis if we do not deal with this problem".

The Tories are having a bit of a wobble. Last week the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), in its annual green budget, advocated more ambitious plans to cut the deficit but said it would be risky to start squeezing too soon. The Tories may have got wind of that, and got wind of voter concerns about the party's austerity message, with a narrowing poll lead. What looked like a firm commitment to begin cutting as soon as David Cameron was in Downing Street appears to have been softened. There would be no "swingeing cuts" in the first year, he said.

You might have expected the US and UK labour markets to behave similarly in this recession. After all, we are supposed to have similarly "Anglo Saxon" flexible labour markets. The contrast, however, is striking. New figures on Friday revealed a welcome drop in the US unemployment rate from 10% to 9.7% but they also revised up the number of jobs lost in America to 8.4 million, 6% of the workforce.

In contrast, UK employment has dropped by only 642,000, a fraction over 2% of the workforce, despite a bigger officially-recorded drop in UK gross domestic product,

The striking thing from this morning's insolvency statistics was that company failures in England and Wales in the fourth quarter, 4,566, were down by 1.7% on the third quarter and by 1.1% on a year earlier. Normally company liquidations lag the cycle, so there could still be worse to come.

Individual insolvencies continued to rise, hitting a record 35,374 in the fourth quarter, up by 24.9% on a year earlier but a modest 0.9% compared with the third quarter. More here.

Producer price inflation in January rose to 3.8%, or 2.5% on a core basis, for output prices, and went up from 7.4% to 8.4% on input prices.

The markets were right to call the end of quantitative easing at the Bank of England's February meeting and interest will now focus on next week's inflation report and the minutes of the monetary policy committee's meeting. In its statement, the Bank says it could return to the policy at some stage if conditions warrant it, but also emphasises that the £200 billion of asset purchases so far will continue to provide a stimulus; the stock matters as well as the flow.

This is the Bank's statement:

"The Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee today voted to maintain the official Bank Rate paid on commercial bank reserves at 0.5%. The Committee also voted to maintain the stock of asset purchases financed by the issuance of central bank reserves at £200 billion.

"After a substantial fall in output, the United Kingdom economy recorded sluggish growth in the final quarter of 2009. Spending by households appears to have picked up a little, though that may partly reflect temporary factors. The rate of decline in businesses’ investment spending appears to have eased. And the world economy continued to recover, raising the demand for UK exports.

The scrappage scheme has been extended a month and the motor industry will mourn its passing. New car registrations in January were 29.8% up on a year earlier and 17.8% of sales were under the scrappage scheme. Even so, the SMMT expects sales for the full year to be down 9% to 1.82 million. More here.

Meanwhile, the Halifax said house prices rose by 0.6% in January and on a three-monthly basis were 3.6% up on a year earlier and on a raw basis 9.9% higher than their April low. The monthly rise was the smallest for several months but was in line with the long-run average. More here.

Swings and roundabouts. After a better than expected purchasing managers' index for manufacturing, ther service sector PMI slipped from 56.8 to a five-month low of 54.5. That is still above 50, so expanding, though at a slightly slower rate. But the blame is put squarely on the poor weather at the beginning of the month, so perhaps not too much to fret about.

The REC/KPMG report on jobs, also produced by Markit, was more upbeat. It said demand for staff grew at its fastest rate since July 2007.

A good start to the year for UK manufacturing, with the Markit-CIPS purchasing managers' index at a 15-year high, lifted by strong exports. The index rose to 56.7 from an upward-revised 54.6 in December. Export orders were the strongest recorded. Good news. More here.

Bank of England data for December were less convincing, with mortgage approvals slipping from 60,045 to 59,023 and consumer credit up by £0.1 billion. Maybe we're seeing some rebalancing. M4 lending excluding intermediate OFCs (other financial corporations) rose by £9.1 billion in December, compared with a £15.6 billion rise in November. More on the Bank's website, www.bankofengland.co.uk.

Sometimes I wish I wrote about sport. There is plenty of debate before and after the match but, except in extremely rare circumstances, the score stands. Whether or not the Russian linesman was right to say the ball crossed the line in the 1966 World Cup final, England won.

In economics, on the other hand, the score rarely stands. Data revisions are as much a part of the game as groin strains in football or tendonitis in tennis.

Thousands of column inches were devoted last week to three things. One was that the economy grew by a mere 0.1% in the final quarter of last year, the second was that this is the deepest post-war recession and the third was that it is the longest.

One is definitely untrue. Even on figures we have, this is not the deepest post-war recession. It shares a 6% peak-to-trough fall with the slump of the early 1980s.