The term ‘soft landing’ is somewhat odd. I suppose it means that the world economy has not crashed into the runway, but instead lightly settled down. But really, there has been no landing at all – if we mean by that a slump or contraction in real GDP globally. Anyway, to use another aphorism, the world economy is really ‘a curate’s egg’, an old-fashioned term to described something that is partly bad and partly good, or more exactly something that is obviously and entirely bad, but is described out of politeness as nonetheless having good features that might redeem it.

The Swiss investment bank expects the country’s oil sector to grow significantly in 2022.