Risk-off sentiment has dominated financial markets year-to-date, largely driven by concerns over the health of the global economy and doubts about central banks’ policies, especially negative interest rates.

The latest economic outlook from the OECD, published last month, forecasts that global growth will pick up in 2015 and 2016.

The euro has lost considerable ground since last spring as the persistence of very weak growth in the eurozone, coupled with a fall in inflation to very low levels, forced the ECB into further policy easing moves.

This year has seen a lot of very robust data on the Irish economy, pointing to a strong rebound in activity. This was confirmed by the National Accounts data published last week for the first half of the year.