Earlier this year, most forecasters thought that the recovery was gaining traction and that economic activity would increase at a solid – though not spectacular – pace through 2012. The labor market was beginning to show some long-awaited improvement, and the financial repair process seemed to be making progress. Analysts thought that higher prices for energy and other commodities would weigh on output growth, as would supply-chain disruptions from the disaster in Japan. But these factors were expected to be transitory, and most forecasters thought growth would improve significantly once these influences had passed. Unfortunately, the news over the past several months has proved this forecast to be too optimistic. To use an automotive analogy, employment and growth are stuck in neutral. Job growth has been disappointing, and the unemployment rate just last month dipped below 9 percent. Revised data indicate that annualized real GDP growth in the first half of 2011 was only 1 percent and improved only modestly to a 2 percent pace in the third quarter. Consumer spending has been particularly sluggish. Furthermore, the weakness in GDP growth began before the bulk of the effects of higher energy prices hit the economy and before the disaster in Japan happened. This timing, along with the continued softness of most economic indicators into the early summer, indicates that the slowing in output growth was not all due to temporary factors. Even with slightly firmer economic data that have come out recently, the sense of building momentum seems absent.
In October we had revised down our growth forecasts for Sweden and abroad considerably and in December we revised the forecasts down by as much again; the economic slowdown had hit with even greater force than we had earlier expected. The weaker krona together with the fall in energy and food prices appeared to some extent to be able to counteract the severe slowdown in the economy. According to our forecast in December, Swedish GDP will decline by 0.5 per cent in 2009, but recover during 2010, when growth increases to approximately 2 per cent. We also revised down the inflation forecast substantially, primarily because of falling energy prices and declining interest expenditure for households. According to our assessment, CPI inflation will on average be just over 1 per cent in 2009. However, inflation will then rise towards the target level at the end of 2010, as economic activity improves and the effects of falling energy prices and interest expenditure no longer affect the inflation figures. The assessment in December was that resource utilisation would be lower than normal over the coming years, while inflation would undershoot the target for a while. Given this, we Executive Board members were agreed that a substantial and long-lasting cut in the repo rate was needed to avoid an unnecessarily long period of inflation undershooting the target and of weak real economic development. Nor were there any advantages to adjusting the repo rate in gradual stages.