http://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/news/article-2308250/ALEX-BRUMMER-Britains-disguised-economic-growth-story.htmlALEX BRUMMER: Britain's disguised economic growth story
In ten days or so, amid much ceremony, the Office for National Statistics will release its estimate of how well the British economy did in the first quarter of the year.
The likelihood, from what we know so far, is that gross domestic product (the total sum of what the nation produces) will have expanded.
There will be much talk, no doubt fuelled by tendentious claims from Labour Party HQ, about how the country barely escaped the horror of a ‘triple-dip’ recession.
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Digital gold
The idea of creating a new global currency is not new.
IMF special drawing rights, part of the Bretton Woods settlement in 1944, sought to do that.
But few such efforts have fared as well as Bitcoin, an internet currency built on smart algorithms that was devised by a mysterious hacker, which is soaring in value.
In January a Bitcoin cost $15. Now it is trading at $179, putting a value of $2billion on the total circulation.
It has become a form of digital gold, a currency in limited supply trusted by those who don’t like money printed by governments.
There is now a Bitcoin exchange, Mt.Gox, and a regulator, the US Crimes
Enforcement Agency.
The big question is, where it goes from here? As rivals come in, Bitcoin could die or go bust.
But like other pioneering efforts on the internet, the concept could yet be embraced by the big boys of money transfer such as Visa or Western Union.
