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Has the second part of the double dip begun, even before the extent of the budget squeeze becomes clear?

Some signs are emerging that it has. Today, we've got that shows the recovery continuing, but its momentum stalling.

The survey is for the Bank of Scotland and brings together evidence from the official unemployment figures and a survey of more than 100 recruitment agencies.

It shows - unsurprisingly - that more people are looking for jobs.

Less obviously, more jobs are being advertised.

It also shows a slight increase in pay rates. Both full- and part-time jobs are being increased, though more so part-time.

That's all good. It supports other evidence that the British labour market remains flexible - not a welcome factor when jobs are lost, but helpful when they're needed.

Around a third of the people who turn up in the labour market survey and are counted as unemployed are not claiming Jobseekers' Allowance. It seems many who lose jobs are finding them fairly quickly.

Skill shortages

However, significant numbers are taking part-time jobs when they'd prefer full-time.

And in Scotland in particular, the Office of National Statistics survey has found significant numbers leaving the workforce altogether; such as students, those with caring responsibilities and those who can afford to do without a wage, if, for instance, they can depend on a partner's income.

So the Bank of Scotland survey, using the same methodology as KPMG research across the UK, finds there is still improvement in the labour market, but it's significant that it is slowing, and it's doing so more than in the UK as a whole.

It also finds that the most new vacancies are in executive and professional roles and in IT and computing.

Don't be surprised to find IT becoming an area of skills shortages.

In the past week, the evidence of a slowdown in the recovery has been gathering pace.

We've recently had the ITEM Club in Scotland warning of it, as well as the Purchasing Managers Index in Scotland.

The most recent Scottish Retail Consortium figures show a weak performance.

Last week, it was Nationwide consumer confidence taking a knock.

This morning, the most recent survey of household confidence, from Markit economic consultancy, shows a deterioration in people's expectations for the economy.

More than quarter of households say their finances have deterioriated in the past month, with only 7% saying they've improved.

Twice as many people expect finances to worsen in the year ahead - 44 to 22%, and the negative sentiment of public sector workers is spreading to the private sector.

Markit claims this is the worst case of pessimism since we were at the worst of the recession.

Fiscal Squeeze

What these all have in common is that they link fears about jobs and the public sector squeeze with an expectation of a downturn in the economy's prospects.

Less public sector spending in Britain, and in Britain's main export markets, means demand being sucked out of the private sector economy.

So the expectation of a fierce fiscal squeeze may be having an impact before it actually kicks in.

Alternatively, this may be a slowing up of recovery that could be expected at this stage anyway.

At the start of this year, economists warned the second half of the year would not look so good, and there was a significant risk of at least one more quarter of recession.

You could argue we've had a fairly solid upswing from the grim picture at the start of last year, and now we may be moving into that territory where the economy wobbles, and where weak progress can be matched from month to month by slight dips.

Back to the 1980s' future

Predicting and understanding the trajectory of this recession requires at least some understanding of recessions past.

And the experience of the 1980s is leaving a substantial legacy in handling this one.

It's partly that the people at senior levels of policy-making came of political age in the 1980s, and talk often of how they were affected.

You can hear it in the Labour leadership contest, with four similar male candidates who speak of seeing their classmates thrown on the economic scrapheap, some of them still bearing the scars.

It's David Cameron and Nick Clegg's generation too, though it's unlikely their school chums faced much of a scrapheap.

And it's Keith Brown's generation - not one of the big beasts of politics, but the Scottish skills minister, who has just announced an initiative to tackle a particular jobs problem coming out of this recession.

This is the 3,000 or so young people who decided, quite sensibly, to stay on at school or college last summer rather than head into the jobs market.

This summer, they're running out of road, and so the effort is being made to support them with training, placements, support in setting up businesses and voluntary work experience.

Youth hospitality

That's also the background to a further initiative, this time from the Scottish Council Development and Industry, which is brokering a Futures Skills Forum, including 60 young members and starting work on Tuesday in Linlithgow.

It's well established that the downturn has hit young people hardest.

Among those claiming benefits, the rate for those aged 18 to 24 is nearly double that of the population as a whole.

In Ayrshire and Lanarkshire, the young people's claimant rate is above 10%. Across the country, 71% are young men.

The economic think tank has spotted a decline of 7 percentage points in the proportion of school leavers going into employment - down from 25 to 18%.

Of those in work, fully a quarter work in the hotel and restaurant industry. That's a sector that hasn't been as hard hit as others.

But with evidence that an early experience of unemployment can have a lasting effect on salaries and on employment experience for decades afterwards, there's a strong case for supporting a group that SCDI has optimistically designated the Powerhouse Generation.