Leading economists agree to differ.

PositionCIMA annual conference round-up - Conference news - Brief article

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The UK base interest rate will probably fall to five or 5.25 per cent in 2008, but rates in the US and EU will rise sterling is currently overvalued and will fall sharply; but the credit crunch is unlikely to cause global recession unless there is another dramatic international disaster.

These were the predictions of Trevor Williams (pictured above), chief economist at Lloyds TSB Corporate Markets, speaking at the CIMA annual conference in London in November.

"If corporate defaults had risen in the credit crunch, we would have gone into a massive, possibly global, recession. That didn't happen," he said. "The reason is that growth is still strong because of globalisation, but the global balance has shifted towards emerging markets."

John Micklethwait (pictured, right), editor-in-chief of The Economist, was far less optimistic about the prospects of the global economy. He pointed to a number of factors that could undermine world trade in the near future: the rise of China, complicated by its...

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