Five years into the crisis, growth in the U.S. is still below potential, Europe is struggling to pull out of recession and major emerging economies are slowing rapidly after an initial resilience during 2010-2011.
It took world leaders some time to realise that the financial crisis initiated by the collapse of the subprime mortgage segment of U.S. financial markets in 2007 would not exhaust its effects in an ordinary recession.
The global economy is awash with successive waves of liquidity generated over the past few years by the four most advanced economies, viz., the United States, the European Union, (EU), Japan and the United Kingdom, known as the G4. This liquidity has taken the form of “quantitative easing” (QE).