The momentum behind the latest data has generally been pretty good. I mean in 2009 in India the monsoon was poor and that holds back agriculture which is a big chunk of their economy, so in 2010 we're hoping things are going to be better. But also, India is not so exposed to the international trade cycle so they haven't been as badly affected as other countries have been. Anyway and all the recent data is looking quite strong.

We've taken the Middle East down. Clearly, Dubai itself has been in trouble for a long time but now we've seen a default and then a bailout from Abu Dhabi. But what that's done is really raised fears around solvency issues. Not just around sovereigns, the governments across the region, but also the issue about to what extent governments will or won't stand behind the private sector companies which previously perhaps investors wrongly have assumed the government would back. So there's a lot of fear about that and that means that credit availability in general becomes more difficult for those businesses and investors are worrying. You're seeing credit market downgrades. So companies that need to borrow to roll over debts are going to find it harder and that's going to crimp growth.

Yes, the acronyms are moving from the more uplifting end towards the rather more pessimistic end - and it's Western Europe. I think it is interesting of course that in the past we always used to think the emerging markets was a terribly risky place, but actually, right now, BRIC economies and plenty of other emerging market economies around the world actually look pretty robust. When you have to start looking for the really riskier places you're looking in Western Europe. So as you say, Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain and I guess there particularly worried about Ireland and Greece. Ireland is small. Greece a bit bigger. Clearly not one of the most significant economies in the eurozone, but we see really significant fiscal stress and all of the political issues that float to the surface when you try to deal with that. I mean the government there hasn't announced a particularly ambitious fiscal consolidation programme because they feel politically that's very difficult to do, but absolutely you see investors terrified about what might happen there. A default is possible, but we think pretty unlikely because as part of the eurozone the implications for eurozone creditworthiness, the value of the euro all those sorts of things mean that other governments would ultimately (perhaps not directly, but certainly indirectly) try to intervene to prevent that. You'll probably get some official support going into Greece to help them through the gap.

Well there are a couple of things. Firstly, we think that by the end of next year you're going to see US interest rates start to creep back up. At the moment what you're seeing is the extraordinary monetary policy measures, the liquidity facilities and so on. They're going to be reined in first and the Fed has actually just announced a series of those are going to come to an end in the first few months of 2010. By the end of the year we think interest rates will be creeping up. So that's going to help support the dollar.

We think that obviously right now the stimulus policies are in full flow and you see a lot of the positive growth numbers being released at the moment, so late 2009/early 2010. There's a big government component to that either directly because governments are spending money, or indirectly because they've either reduced taxes or they're pumping liquidity into the financial system and that's feeding through. As we go through 2010 a lot of those policies are not affordable. Certainly Western governments can't continue to run budget deficits as big as the ones that we're seeing at the moment because government debt is rising to a level that becomes quite worrying. It's going to have implications for long-term interest rates. So you're not going to see those stimulus packages of a similar scale next year. You will see significant government spending, but certainly the injection of additional liquidity into the economy, that will be less and that means that growth will drop away unless the private sector steps up to the plate and starts spending more. Right now we're not really seeing that and the issue, I think, is that for businesses and individuals, while all this government spending is helping them out, it doesn't alter the fact that a lot of businesses and a lot of people are carrying far more debt than they're comfortable with and their priority is to repay. Of course, when you're repaying you're not investing, you're not spending and that suggests to us as we get to the end of 2010 and into 2011 growth is going to slow down and in some markets, quite markedly.

The banks have quite a big issue themselves. I mean clearly their balance sheets are extraordinarily weak and while we're seeing a lot of very good results being released at the moment, of course the government is standing behind a lot of those results. So it may be liquidity facilities. There's been a lot of regulatory forbearance, so banks have not had to deliver these results in a truly private sector market. They've had a lot of support. So we think going forwards what you're going to see is a much more risk averse attitude on the part of banks towards lending and banks are going to be much more reluctant to take on the sorts of credit risks that they were taking on a couple of years ago. Their balance sheets aren't strong enough and the flipside, of course, is that the rest of the private sector probably won't want to borrow like that in the future anyway. So our hunch is that banks will not be lending in anything like the way that we were used to over the early years of this decade and again, the lack of credit flowing through the economy suggests softer investment, softer employment growth than we've seen in the past. And while it's easy to think that's a bad negative scenario, it's transitory, we'll come out of it, actually, what we think is that the long run equilibrium for the world is a lower credit and probably lower growth world certainly in the Western countries in Europe and America and we need to get used to that. So we can't benchmark a recovery on going back to where we were in 2006 because we think that's not sustainable.

Yes, as fiscal stimulus is removed, the strength of the private sector, or the lack of strength in the private sector, is going to be the main story around the economy and with all of the debt that's still there and will still be there at that time, there will be a much lower willingness to invest, a much lower willingness to consume than we've seen in the past. There will be a lot more saving, a lot more paying down debt and those balance sheet issues that we see in America, which are there now but are disguised by the fact that the government is pumping in so much cash, will act to retard growth. And while we don't expect America to end up looking like Japan did during the 1990s, the broad picture about what's happening is not that dissimilar.