Introduction Good morning, and Happy New Year to all. Here we are at the beginning of 2016, almost eight years after the global financial crisis, which spawned the most synchronized worldwide economic downturn in history. A rerun of the Great Depression of the 1930s was averted, but the recovery has been anything but synchronized.
In fact, the dominant theme across the global economy has become “divergence.” At one end of the spectrum, the U.S. Federal Reserve has just started its interest rate normalization process after seven years of keeping its policy rate near zero. At the other end, the European Central Bank (ECB) recently cut its deposit rate to negative 0.3 per cent.