What a difference half a year makes. In early April, dark clouds hung over the world, the fear of a depression was real and policymakers were devising ever more unorthodox ways of breathing life into a moribund global economy. Now, the world is growing again, economic data over the summer has surprised almost everyone with its resilience and talk has started about ensuring that policy does not repeat the mistakes of the past.
Barack Obama, US president, caught the mood at the Group of 20 summit in Pittsburgh last month, saying: “Because of the bold and co-ordinated action that we took, millions of jobs have been saved or created, the decline in output has been stopped, financial markets have come back to life and we stopped the crisis from spreading further to the developing world.”
