ING global economic outlook 2023 December 2022 ‘May he live in interesting times’ Rarely have predictions for an upcoming year been so difficult and wide-ranging. But we are sure of some things, and we are doing our best to help you navigate this unprecedented uncertainty 3 calls for 2023: Recession, inflation and central banks Carsten Brzeski on what he's expecting in 2023 Goodbye to all that 'May he live in interesting times' is a Chinese proverb that many of us have heard, perhaps a little too often in recent times. The list of unprecedented crises gets longer by the year. 2022 was supposed to be the year of post-pandemic and post-lockdown reopenings. But it became the year of war, inflation, energy and commodity price crises, drought and floods. It was also a year which saw a paradigm shift at major central banks, trying to fight inflation at all costs. It's where we said goodbye to low interest rates for longer and that easing bias. Central banks got all of us used to jumbo-size rate hikes and, at least in the US, the policy rate is almost back at levels last seen prior to other financial crises. 2022 was also the year of what the Germans call 'Zeitenwende' or 'game changer', at least for Europe: a war in the EU’s backyard, which is still ongoing with no end in sight; an end to cheap energy, and an end to globalisation as we knew it. Combined with the well-known longer-term challenges of population ageing, a lack of international competitiveness, and the never-ending debate on further European integration, Europe's to-do list is long. The chances are very high that the continent will have a hard time returning to a pre-growth trajectory any time soon. Different shades of recession So what will 2023 bring? A natural reflex of many forecasters is to simply extrapolate recent trends and developments into the new year. And, indeed, many of this year's issues will also be prominent in the next: war, the energy crisis, inflation, trade tensions and even Covid are likely to affect the global economy significantly. This is not the moment to identify potential new black or grey swans... nor even pink ones. Our predictions and calls for 2023 reflect our base case: median forecasts backed by this year’s events and assumptions. We expect to see several different shades of recession in 2023. We should get a rather textbook-style recession in the US with the central bank hiking rates until the real estate