This article is one of a series describing attempts made at the National Institute to develop formal methods of preparing short-run forecasts of United Kingdom exports. The first article was concerned with British exports of manufactures to industrial countries and the second with exports to primary producers.

Since the beginning of 1995 output has been growing at a quarterly rate of just under ½ per cent, slightly less than most estimates of the trend growth rate that the economy can sustain in the long run. As a consequence, there has been no progress in closing any pre-existing output gap. Over this period, there has been a lack of any domestically generated inflationary pressure. Indeed, if import prices had not risen sharply in 1995, the underlying rate of inflation would have remained below 2½ per cent.

Money is held to economise on the high cost of conducting transactions in a barter economy, to provide a ‘precautionary’ reserve in case of unforeseen expenses and for speculative reasons, such as bearish expectations about shares or government securities. But if conventional money changes in value rapidly it ceases to serve all these purposes. In these circumstances it may become more convenient to conduct future transactions in terms of index-linked contracts which have the effect of changing the unit of account into a given basket of goods by specifying that future payments in terms of nominal pounds are to be scaled up or down by an amount which depends on the changes in an index of average prices.

This article aims to compare the National Institute's forecasting performance with that of United States forecasters. Because of the magnitude of this task, we restrict our attention to forecasts of the principal output measure in each country—real gross domestic product in the United Kingdom and real gross national product in the United States. Results for US forecasters are taken from the detailed study by McNees (1975), where there is also information on the methods employed by these forecasters.

Crises have a common shape but not always common consequences, as Barrell and Davis (2005) discuss. Asset bubbles are associated with the run-up to most crises and regulators should respond, taking an asset bubble as a signal of a need for precautionary action. It is easy to say that fundamentals have changed an asset market, and hard to spot a bubble. It is also common to suggest that interest rate policy should be set to constrain bubbles such as those in housing markets in recent years. Not only is it difficult for the central bank to use interest rates to constrain a bubble, it is also inappropriate if inflation is under control. It is for the financial market regulator, which may or may not be in the central bank, to respond to the bubble and strengthen its precautionary measures designed to raise lending standards.

In this Review, as a response to comments from readers, we have replaced the consumer price index by the retail price index as a measure of annual price inflation in our Summary table of our forecast for the home economy. This note therefore sets out the differences between the two series in order to make the nature of the change clear.

Growth in the US appears to be slowing rapidly after an expansion of 4.8 per cent at an annual rate in the third quarter of 2007. As we can see from figure 5, growth dropped to almost zero per cent at an annual rate in the fourth quarter and we expect the rate to be negative in the first quarter of this year. The growth rate will be negative for the first time since the downturn in 2001, which, after data revision, no longer constitutes a technical recession.

In Western Europe GDP appears to have fallen in the second quarter, mainly because of the strikes in West Germany and the UK. Growth in North America and to a lesser extent in Japan was slowing down but still fast enough to keep the total output of the OECD area on its upward course. For the first half of the year this was probably about 2½ per cent up on the second half of 1983 and 5 per cent up on the first half.

A financial crisis, rooted in US mortgage defaults, has been building for several years. Its effects have seriously damaged the prospects for the global economy, and have particularly serious consequences for the English speaking world. Unsound lending permitted by poor regulation and worsened by lax bankruptcy laws has led the US, and potentially the rest of the OECD, to the brink of a large-scale recession. The scale of the potential slowdown depends upon the scale of losses to the banking system and their impacts on the ability of the banking system to lend.