In the course of 2008, as negative signals repeatedly came in and the state of the world economy worsened systematically, the estimates were revised downwards, but only very slowly until the autumn; as late as October (the month following the failure of Lehman Brothers), forecasters expected that GDP would expand, even if only modestly, in the United States, the euro area and Italy.
Now, at the end of February 2009 and more than a year and a half since the outbreak of the crisis, GDP is expected to contract in 2009 by approximately 2 per cent in all three of those economies. Within the span of one year, the GDP growth forecasts were revised downwards by 4-5 percentage points.