The Monday Briefing

Deficits, debt in The Monday Briefing

Summer reading list


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You may not have been able to get to your preferred holiday haunt this year, but we hope that our summer reading list will offer a distraction wherever you spend your summer break. The eight articles are available free online, although some websites restrict the number of articles that can be accessed without charge each month.

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Posted on 26/07/2021

Summer economic outlook


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So far 2021 has been a year of improving global economic prospects, particularly in advanced economies. The rollout of vaccines and an easing of restrictions across the West have underpinned a strong recovery in activity – albeit one marked, increasingly, by surging cases of the Delta variant.

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Posted on 19/07/2021

The looming capex boom

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Throughout history economies have been shaped by shocks, from recessions to technological shifts and energy transitions. The Great Depression helped change thinking about the role of government, paving the way for a permanent expansion in the state. The switch from steam power to electricity triggered a vast reorganisation of manufacturing.

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Posted on 21/06/2021

China, the too-much investment economy

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The emergence of a novel respiratory disease in late 2019 in Hubei province marked the start of what was to become a global pandemic. While the first recorded cases were in China, China has suffered a remarkably low death rate and has avoided the deep recessions that have befallen the rest of the world.

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Posted on 26/04/2021

Global outlook brightens, but…

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The world is emerging from a deep recession, and the recovery is coming faster than expected. With more than 800m vaccines administered globally, activity holding up despite lockdowns and additional fiscal stimulus coming, economists have been upgrading their GDP forecasts.

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Posted on 19/04/2021

Public spending, debt and inflation: what’s next?

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Join me for our Spring economic update webinar on Tuesday, 30 March, 14:30–15:30 GMT. To register please visit: https://event.webcasts.com/starthere.jsp?ei=1440317&tp_key=533939db50

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Posted on 15/03/2021

Global slump, equity boom

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Strange though it might seem, amid the greatest economic downturn since the Depression, equities have soared. Markets had a dreadful start in 2020. The dawning realisation that the world faced a global pandemic triggered a crash, with global stocks losing a third of their value in the five weeks to 23 March. Since then, equities have staged a comeback, rising by 70% and shrugging off a rising death toll, the discovery of new, more contagious variants of the virus, further lockdowns, Brexit and America’s political turmoil. The world economy is significantly smaller today than it was a year ago, while global equity markets are 12% higher.

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Posted on 18/01/2021

Is the economic emergency beginning or ending?

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Last week the UK chancellor, Rishi Sunak, warned that the UK’s “economic emergency has only just begun”. This struck me as overly pessimistic. While it’s not hard to think of things that could go wrong, some things are going right. Here are three of them, drawing on last week’s spending review and the accompanying report from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).

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Posted on 30/11/2020

Deloitte Monday Briefing: US elections, UK lockdown

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Faced with choosing to write about the US elections or the lockdown in England in this week’s briefing we are doing the obvious thing and covering both.

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Posted on 12/11/2020

The age of government activism

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Join our next fortnightly COVID-19 webinar, focussing on building resilience, on Thursday, 5 November, at 13:00 GMT: https://event.webcasts.com/starthere.jsp?ei=1365454&tp_key=8f4d835e66&sti=mmb

Governments around the world have responded to the pandemic by borrowing, and spending, on a vast scale, equivalent to 12% of world GDP. Twelve years ago, in the financial crisis, monetary policy did the heavy lifting in supporting growth. Now, with interest rates near zero, the burden has fallen on fiscal policy.

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Posted on 02/11/2020