Happy new decade?
A New Year is typically a time for taking stock, for looking back at the year just gone, and thinking about the year to come. This year of course marks a bigger transition, from the 2010s to the 2020s. The past decade has been a volatile one, existing under the shadow of the global financial crisis of 2008-09, from which the world was still just emerging in 2010. Over the past decade, ‘quantitative easing’ has helped prevent deflation and driven a decade long stock market rally, but also kept both public and private debt levels high, as interest rates stay low. Weaning the global economy off QE has proved to be far more difficult than many anticipated.
