Federal Reserve

ECONOMIC OUTLOOK

SPECIAL REPORT

Janet Yellen's appointment as chairman of the US Federal Reserve could see tapering of quantitative easing (QE) as early as December, experts say.

With the summer an increasingly distant memory, fund managers are now back at their desks and starting to navigate Q4 - that is, with a few notable exceptions.

Janet Yellen will be nominated as the first female Federal Reserve chairman later today, in a ceremony attended by Barack Obama and current chair Ben Bernanke.

Multi-asset managers are raising cash levels and adding to government bonds as fears over the US economy spook investors.

Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), has warned failure to raise the debt ceiling could be far worse than the current US government shutdown.

What a difference a year makes. Last autumn, you may recall, we were all holding our heads in our hands, lamenting the sorry state of the UK economy.

Now the world economy is recovering, market attention has moved on from competing strategies to deal with the debt crisis.

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