Realistically, it will be quite some time before the Europeans will be able to say these problems have been put behind them, even if things go well. Turning to the domestic economy, the sequence of changes in assessment has tended to be the obverse of what we have seen internationally.
At the previous hearing we believed, on the basis of the available data, that overall growth had been close to trend over 2011. Subsequently we could not avoid revising that view downwards a bit, as there seemed to be some emerging evidence that growth had been weaker than that.