A mid-year review of our big calls

This Focus provides an interim report on the calls that we published at the start of the year. We were right to be cautious on the prospects for the global economy and equity markets and to forecast that US Treasury yields would fall rather than rise. The crisis in the euro-zone has also intensified, the UK economy has stalled and the Bank of England has remained on hold, again as we thought likely. Admittedly, some commodity prices have held up better than we had anticipated, partly because of events in the Middle East, and the dollar fell when we had looked for an earlier recovery. But, as we predicted, gold has hit new highs.