Review 2012

Well what a year we’ve had! There has been the most expensive Presidential Election of any country ever, Greece has gone from bad to worse, the Arab Spring continues in Syria and here in Britain we entered into a double dip recession. Although I don’t feel that 2012 was the year of change that 2011 was, it will still go down as important in the history books. The shooting of a 15 year old girl by the Pakistani Taliban sparked outrage in the country. The attack could help to stop people joining the terrorist organisation! The Palestinian-Israeli conflict took a turn for the worse after Israel killed one of Hamas’ leaders and Israel was furious when Palestine had its status upgraded in the UN.

The year saw a change of leadership in China and France and Greece choose a new government for its sinking economy. It was confirmed that in 2013 the EU will get a new member, Croatia, whilst the Eurozone crisis continued to rattle on.  

The year ahead of us will be the sixth since the economic crisis began and still there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Predictions are that the Eurozone economy has shrunk by a small amount in the past year, the same is true for Britain. What stopped the crisis that began in 2007 being worse than the 1929 crash was the economies of the developing nations, particularly Brazil, China and India. Unfortunately their economies are beginning to slow down, China has stopped producing double digit growth for the first time in a decade and India and Brazil are below 5%. Although European countries would kill for growth figures like those, the world economy depends on them being very high. The US has just fallen off the fiscal cliff (although a deal should be one the way) and Europe’s economy is expected to shrink again this year, if the developing nations’ economies do start to slow this could have cataclysmic knock on effects.

We are living in a time of change, what happens over the next year could prove very important in the long run.