Central banks diverge

Monetary policy in the world’s two biggest economies looks set to go their separate ways.

For the past seven years, the central banks of the world's big economies have been moving in the same direction, slashing interest rates and printing money in an attempt to soften the impact of the credit crunch and revive growth.

But now, monetary policy in the world's two biggest economies looks set to diverge. In the recovering US, as Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen noted last week, the question is, when will interest rates rise?

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Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.