How will the world economy and particularly the financial sector perform in 1999? A five-member TIME Board of Economists gathered earlier this month at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to give predictions. Their views were a finely balanced mix of relief, short-term optimism and long-term anxiety.
There is relief because the global meltdown that many feared a year ago has not materialized. "We got very close to the edge of a financial crisis we haven't seen since the 1930s, which had the potential of pulling into that vortex the financial institutions and markets of the core economies," says Kenneth...