Cazenove's Jeffrey: Which way will the economy go?

Which way will the economy go?

Richard Jeffrey, chief investment officer of Cazenove Capital, on what investors should consider 'normal' in today's economic environment.

I have a confession to make. I think I have been misleading readers by referring to the current economic environment as the new normal. This is wrong: I should simply refer to this as normal. Not normal in every way, perhaps – the policy framework is far from being normal. But the growth backdrop is much more normal than the period prior to the recession. Mervyn King, in a speech when he was Governor of the Bank of England, referred to the ten years from mid-1992 as the nice decade (non-inflationary, consistently expansionary). In the end, this unprecedented stretch of uninterrupted g...