Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies thinktank, said: "Two more years of substantial real public spending cuts: that is what the chancellor has promised in response to the OBR's dramatically worsened macroeconomic forecasts.
Its pro-retiree slant might be electorally sensible, and perhaps even a simplifying improvement, but it has left the bigger fiscal and macroeconomic issues completely untouched.
The principal macroeconomic problem facing the British economy is the size of its balance of payments deficit.
The halving of the oil price affords western economies a macroeconomic opportunity.
There's also a macroeconomic case, which Vince Cable understands as well as Ed Balls, for easing up on the cuts and making smart investment choices that will help lift the UK economy off the bottom, where it is bumping along quietly in company with most of our neighbours.
Elsewhere ITV was 3.8p better at 183.4p after Nomura raised its price target from 170p to 200p, saying: Continued UK macroeconomic improvement means we raise our ITV 2013 ad forecast to 1.5% (from 1%) and our 2014 forecast to 4% (from 2%).
It was, perhaps, in his application of logic to macroeconomic analysis that he was supreme.
In his forensic analysis of "The Macroeconomic Record of the Coalition Government National Institute Economic Reviewew, February 2015) the economist Simon Wren-Lewis compares the total growth of output per capita in the UK from 2010 to 2013 with experience under two previous recoveries from recession, both of which were under Conservative governments.
Armstrong, NIESR's director of macroeconomic research, said there were considerable risks for a country with high debt levels adopting another country's currency, in this case the pound, in an informal way.
Since then, much of his work has focused on understanding the linkages over time between the prices of assets and macroeconomic variables such as total consumption a fast-growing field known as macro-financial modelling.
After Lula was elected in 2002 investors dumped Brazilian assets, fearing that the former socialist firebrand would scrap his predecessor's orthodox macroeconomic policies.
