Recognising Risks In The Global Recovery

The Bank for International Settlements is the stopped clock of international economic institutions.

- Martin Wolf

The Bank for International Settlements is the stopped clock of international economic institutions. It has argued for monetary and fiscal tightening, whether that makes sense, or not. Fortunately, policymakers, or at least the central banks that are members of the BIS, have ignored its apparent conviction that the world needed an even deeper and more prolonged recession. Yet now, precisely because central banks wisely ignored its advice, a synchronized recovery has finally arrived. So does the latest BIS annual report tell the right time again, as it did in the years before the crisis?

It is worth recalling how wrong the BIS has been in the past. In June 2010, when, as we now know, the post-crisis damage was very much with us, the BIS already asserted that “the time has come to ask when and how these powerful measures can be phased out”. Oh no, it had not. The time had come to act more aggressively to accelerate the recovery and so limit the longer-term damage of the crisis. The need then was not to phase out monetary and fiscal stimulus, but to strengthen it. The weak recovery is in good part a consequence of that failure.

Yet now things do look different. As Catherine Mann, chief economist of the OECD has stated, things are “better, but not good enough”. The Paris-based club of developed economies, in line with most forecasters, expects a modest pick-up in global growth this year and next. The hope must be that this will be the beginning of a sustained upswing, in which strengthening investment and faster productivity growth keep inflation in check. But hope is what this still is. So what risks lie in wait for the recovery?