We are working in an atmosphere where it is no longer novel to be involved in tasks or projects characterized as “being done for the first time since the Bank’s founding.” This new year is likely to be recorded in history as a turning point when a new economic paradigm took hold across the world, in other words when categorically new initiatives differing radically from those in the past were initiated.
We will see signs of advanced economies including the United States breaking slowly free of the chains of the very severe Global Financial Crisis we have experienced over the past five years, the biggest such ordeal in nearly a century.