So far so good

Last year, in the January report “2010 to be better” we referred to 2009 as a year we would wish to forget quickly. Actually, the economic slowdown was quite evident. Despite the fact that H1 2009 witnessed a continued deterioration of the sentiment, we did not follow the pattern of pessimistic projections envisaging a potential recession in Poland. Concurrently, we expected lower investments, exports and employment. Overall, our forecast produced a year ago and providing for the GDP growth of 2% proves to be quite close to the economic reality, though, we need to admit that it was revised a number of times (first downwards and later upwards). The scale of the Polish zloty depreciation seen at the beginning of the last year and driven by a rapid deterioration of investors’ sentiment towards our region came as the biggest surprise. During the year, however, it proved obvious to everyone that the Polish economy would get through the crisis much less affected than the Baltic states or Ukraine, which consequently led to the Polish zloty strengthening. more »