The global economy could be back to pre-crisis growth levels by 2012, according to respondents to our web poll last week. The news will cheer Barack Obama, who will be running for re-election just as confidence returns and history suggests that incumbents never lose when the economy is doing well.
Some of our readers were even more confident, with a few predicting we’d be back to full steam by the end of this year. That seems optimistic. The IMF reckons that global growth was around 5% during 2006 and 2007. Its prediction for this year is 3.9%, compared to -1.1% in 2009. That represents good progress, particularly in the US, where some...