 How is the dire budget situation in the United States and the politics surrounding it impacting business? Pretty badly. The United States budget is definitely in a bad state. As you probably know the US recently raised its borrowing ceiling which allows it to raise up to 17 trillion dollars in amounts that have to be paid out by the US government. And before that vote was taken there was a huge fight in Congress. I think there are really two different dimensions to the problem. One is that actually the political fight itself caused a huge amount of insecurity. We saw that the US lost its triple grade A rating according to one budget agency and that has definitely affected companies willingness to take on new staff and to make capital investments. The other thing which perhaps people don't see so obviously is that while they're involved in this budget fight Congress isn't dealing with some of the other big issues on the agenda. So we have outstanding issues like free trade agreements with three different countries and a new deal on patent reform which are very important for businesses and those have simply been put onto the back burner whilst everybody's talking about the budget. Do you have any insights on whether the United States economy is heading? In many ways the US economy is in the same sort of situation that the UK economy is in. We're looking at a sustained period of very slow growth. The Congressional Budget Office has recently released some downgraded figures for expectations and they're actually looking at 2.4% growth this year, increasing a little bit next year. I think that's probably over optimistic and we're going to see that assessment being downgraded again. So we're looking at a very uncomfortable period. Politically the problem this creates is that the slow growth just isn't enough to make a dent in the unemployment numbers and at 9% US unemployment is still pretty high and that will create all sorts of political difficulties for President Obama. So we saw last night he made a big speech and talked about how Congress could act to get America working again and he looked at a $447 billion plan called the American Jobs Bill. There are some ideas in there that are perfectly sensible. New money for infrastructure development, extending unemployment insurance, helping out states and a lot of the states have budget situations that frankly make the federal budget look healthy. But the difficulty that Obama has is of course he can't actually do any of this. All he can do is to suggest to Congress that it passes the budget. So we're back in the world of political wrangling that we saw in the run-up to the debt-sealing debate. So I'm afraid I think things are looking pretty grim for the United States. Sustained period of slow growth, sustained period of high unemployment, worries about inflationary pressures building up and worries about where are the components of demand that will actually increase US growth going forward. We've just over a year until a presidential election. Do you have any views at this stage on possible scenarios? Well of course the first thing to say is it is just fantastic theatre to watch. Everybody wants to talk about particularly the Republican candidates who are going to be competing for the election for the next couple of months. We've got a very wide range of candidates on the Republican side and I think from a business point of view the difficulty is actually separating out a lot of the noise around their candidacy from an actual assessment of how business-friendly they are. The two frontrunners, the Governor of Texas Rick Perry and the former candidate Mitt Romney, the former Governor of Massachusetts who ran last time, are both on one level quite business-friendly. They both have business experience and they both run states which have differing but interesting approaches to how to support business in the state. So on one level maybe this should be a good Republican candidate for business but for the next couple of months all we're going to see is a lot of noise around their other issues that they were talking about, particularly in the context of US politics, their social policy positions and whether or not you think it matters if the President of the United States believes in creation versus evolution is kind of up to you. The other thing that it's worth noting is that whilst most of the attention will focus on the presidential election there is of course a congressional election as well. The entire House of Representatives and one third of the Senate and the really important thing for business to keep an eye on is whether or not the Republicans take control of the Senate. At the moment the Democrats do actually have a majority but it's a very thin one and their problem is that in 2012 they are defending more seats than the Republicans and they are defending some very vulnerable seats. So it's quite possible that we could see a swing of as many as 7 or 8 seats in the Senate which will mean that you have the Republicans controlling both the House of Representatives and the Senate and then you have a Democratic President if Obama gets re-elected and that unfortunately could be a recipe for more political gridlock and for again a political failure to take the difficult decisions that need to be taken to get the economy back on track.