In December, the BIS highlighted the “uneasy calm” in financial markets in its Quarterly Review. As we entered 2016, the uneasy calm gave way to quite a turbulent start to the year in the financial markets. The global economy now finds itself at the centre of three major economic developments. The first is disappointing growth and downward revisions of projections, especially in emerging economies; the second is the large shifts in exchange rates, again especially for emerging market currencies against the US dollar; and the third is the sharp fall in commodity prices, hitting a number of commodity-exporting countries particularly hard, but at the same time providing a positive dividend to other economies.[…]