Weekly Economic Perspectives Quarterly Edition: Sub-Trend Global Growth as Monetary Tightening Bites

The world has dramatically changed multiple times over the course of the last three years. From pandemic to war, the shocks to the global economy have been varied, intense, and difficult to calibrate. At times, macroeconomic forecasts have had to undergo substantial revisions from one quarter to the next. We are at such a juncture now. Our audience may recall that when we last published official forecasts in early March, we highlighted that “uncertainty is high, perhaps higher than it has ever been since the early days of Covid”. Nevertheless, an assumption needed to anchor our projections and we worked on the expectation that the acute phase of the Ukraine war would be fairly shortlived, preserving the “opportunity to recover from this shock during the second half of the year”. We also recognized, however, that this was merely an assumption, that “we do not know for sure and things could take a turn for the far worse”. Unfortunately, they did.