When America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold... so goes the old saying. There’s no doubt that despite the rise of China, the US economy is still hugely influential in global terms. Nothing illustrates this better than the global financial crisis of 2008, which was triggered by the implosion of the US sub-prime mortgage market, and reached its nadir with the bankruptcy of US investment bank, Lehman Brothers.

Having been the first to enter recession, the US was also the first major economy to recover and the US Federal Reserve has been the first (and only) developed-world central bank to begin raising interest rates.