The IMF and the World Bank, these two excellent globalist storage sidings for over-the-hill politicians in need of a job that have perpetuated themselves successfully since the Bretton Woods conference, frequently pop up in the press with unwanted advice and unneeded forecasts.
In fact, they provide endless reams of useless economic forecasts, which usually don’t pan out, but presumably require countless man-hours to produce. In spite of the waste involved, it is actually a lot less pernicious than many of their other activities. These include ‘policy advice’ (some of which lately includes a number of proposals as to how to best impose ‘financial repression’ or tax the wealth of the subjects of various nation states to keep the charade of the regulatory welfare/warfare state going by all means) and activities in support of the global fiat money system and its ever-growing mountains of debt, in which capacity the IMF acts as a lender/enforcer and the World Bank as a distributor of ‘development funds’ that seem to do, well, whatever (it’s not ‘development’, because the main recipients remain curiously undeveloped).
Anyway, the World Bank recently published a new economic forecast that proves once again that rising asset markets tend to write the news and can induce severe cases of wishful thinking:
“Global growth is set to accelerate in 2014 as advanced economies turn a corner five years after the global financial crisis, said the World Bank. Growth is projected to strengthen to 3.2 percent this year, 3.4 percent in 2015, and 3.6 percent in 2016 – up from 2.4 percent in 2013.
“Most of the acceleration is expected to come from high-income countries, as the drag on growth from fiscal consolidation and policy uncertainty eases and private sector recoveries gain firmer footing,” the World Bank wrote in its newly-released Global Economic Prospects report on Wednesday.
Stronger growth and increased demand from developed nations will be an important tailwind for developing countries and should help compensate for the impending tightening of financial conditions, the Washington-based development bank said.
[…]
The bank says the withdrawal of quantitative easing and corresponding increase in global interest rates is expected to weigh only modestly on investment and growth in developing countries as capital costs rise and capital flows moderate in line with a global portfolio rebalancing.
“When we look at what’s happened since December, markets have been broadly calm. And that gives us some confidence that we might see a much more smooth process going forward,” Andrew Burns, a top forecaster at the World Bank and chief author of its Global Economic Prospects report, told CNBC Wednesday.â€
(emphasis added)
This promotion is in keeping with the one recently propagated by the Fed, which asserts that nothing bad can possibly happen, ‘QE works’ and there is of course ‘no bubble risk’ in sight anywhere. This latter assertion comes from the soon retiring lame duck grand poobah Ben Bernanke himself, and should be discounted accordingly (the man was e.g. utterly incapable to spot the housing and mortgage bubble that even accordingly to his colleague James Bullard was ‘blindingly obvious’. Of course Bullard in turn also failed to remark on this oh so obvious problem in real time, and hindsight is 20/20).
