All of that is indeed good news. There are plenty of times in the past 40 years when that set of indicators would have been very welcome. The trouble is that you don't have to look long and hard to find another set of indicators that would have frightened the living daylights out of most economic commentators at any time over those 40 years. And these continue to get worse.
Start with the national debt and the balance of government income and expenditure. At the end of 2015 the UK government owed 89% of the entire UK national income for one year. This figure was only 42% at the end of 2007. So we have more than doubled government debt and Hammond has decided that he doesn't know when he will be able to stop that rising. Don't get me wrong. I am not one to argue that it is never sensible for a government to run a deficit. I strongly believe that having our government make wise long term investments that strengthen the stability of our economic position is a very good thing. But does anyone believe that this is how we have got ourselves into so much debt? Or that the investments have been the product of conscious wise long term thinking? Instead what has happened is that a government budget that was in surplus at the turn of the century has spiralled utterly out of control since we hit the banking crisis. Despite all the unreasonable cutbacks and austerity measures imposed on those like teachers, nurses and elderly people in need of care the government has spent so much money bailing out the financial industry and lost so much money in falling revenues that there seems little or no prospect of it balancing its books anytime soon.
No matter you may think - at least we are still the fifth largest economy in the world and are a great trading nation. Actually following the decline in the pound we are now the 7th largest economy and are rapidly being left behind. In the second quarter of 2016 the UK spent £28,684,000,000 more abroad than we earned. Which is pretty scary. It means that twenty eight thousand millionaires worth of our economy needs to be sold off to foreigners every 3 months in order to balance trade losses. Sooner or later we have to find a way of turning around this deficit to stop the rot. Instead the problem has been getting steadily worse since 1999 which was the last time when we were in sight of break even. A decline in the pound may help exports a little but it also puts up the bill of our imports and you have to be producing things people want to buy in order to sell more abroad even at lower prices. You can't repair decades of under-investment by dropping the value of your currency.
At the same time as all this has been going on the Bank of England has been furiously - and not entirely unhelpfully - propping up the economy by running the electronic printing presses. After 2008 they printed the astonishing sum of £375,000,000,000 and pumped it into the banking system. You may not have noticed much long term gain from this. Instead of investing that money in restructuring the economy to face the future it was wasted on a short term panic injection of cash into a system that had totally failed. But that didn't stop them. When Brexit was announced they decided to print even more and use it almost as badly. Printing money is normally a very dangerous thing for a central bank to do as it usually causes inflation. But in a time of slow growth they can get away with it because the amount of money they are pouring into the system is finely calculated to balance out the slowing up of lending by banks and the slowing down of spending by companies worried by recession. So this injection of cash was a one off chance to invest in the transformation of our economy. Instead it was wasted on trying to shore up a largely unreformed banking sector. That wall of money just about kept the economy ticking over and it is the main reason that the UK economy has avoided the worst of the post 2008 crash recession.
However, you can't go on printing money for ever, especially if you are going to fritter it away on an insecure stock market boom. Sooner or later inflation starts to pick up and then running the printing presses becomes very dangerous. The fall in the value of the pound after Brexit is highly likely to be the start of that moment in time. So picture the choices for Hammond in the autumn statement are stark:
1. He needs to get the national debt under control. But people have had enough of austerity and growth is slowing up. He can't afford to do it politically or economically.
2. The Bank of England has begun to run to the end of its own box of tricks. It has cut interest rates to the lowest possible level and is nearly at the end of what it dares to do in printing money. They are unlikely to take up the slack.
3. He needs the private sector in the UK economy to produce more goods and services that people abroad want and for us consumers to buy less from abroad. But a lot of investors are very unsure about the future and uncertainty is bad for investment. The UK already has a dreadful record of underinvestment and the reputation of our financial service industry is in tatters.
4. He wants to re-assure industry and commerce that it can safely invest in the UK and doesn't need to worry about extra tariffs post Brexit. But when he promises money to one manufacturer the others want the same. He can't afford to compensate all of them for Brexit tariffs either financially or politically.
5. He has promised to act to help all those who are just managing and he has promised to rebalance the economy in favour of the regions. Expectations from the public are high. Unfortunately action of this nature cuts directly against the wishes of the newly empowered right wing of his party. Any move he makes that doesn't involve cutting taxes and reducing the power of the state is going to be attacked.
6. He faces a severe cash shortage in virtually all public services as a result of years of austerity. At the same time large chunks of the public think Brexit means he can spend £370 million a week more on the NHS.
7. If there is any repeat of the 2008 panic then he is completely out of ammunition.
To me that looks like a list that is more worrying than the headline numbers that the Chancellor wants us all to focus on. The new government has a huge fund of goodwill in the country from ordinary people who think that May is a breath of fresh air after Cameron and who want to see all this Brexit stuff result in an improvement in their standard of living and in the way public services are run. In actuality Hammond is going to have to produce an autumn budget in the middle of one of the worst economic situations the country has faced since the 1940s. He will do his best to convince us that he is in full control and all is for the best. But let's get ready to look hard at what he actually does. Expect to see a lot of spin and very little cash.
A clever magician can pull rabbits out of hats where none seem ever to have been present. It remains to be seen whether Hammond is a clever enough Chancellor to pull off much the same trick. If he isn't then his budget looks set to be the first step on the long and rapid decline in the popularity of the UK's unelected and utterly split new government.