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Your guide to this week's big economic events.

The UK has not yet left the EU and the outlook for its future relationship with the bloc is uncertain.

Is the trade war disruptive, or is it merely accelerating trends already underway?

The current US economic expansion that began in 2009 will mark its ten-year anniversary in June.

The stakes are high for elections to the European Parliament in May.

Emerging-market economies experienced a year of tumult in 2018 amid less accommodative global financial conditions, slowing economic growth in China and fraught US-China trade relations.

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•The new political landscape in Italy is hardly surprising: it has emerged from the convergence of both global tendencies and idiosyncratic factors. •Going forward, Italy’s short-term economic outlook includes some positive elements. However, material downside risks loom amid high policy uncertainty, both domestically and externally. •Italy’s long-term issues include the sustainability of its large public debt and more importantly, its poor growth prospects. Labour productivity growth has been on a downward trajectory since the early ‘90s.

“Participants generally agreed with the assessment that continuing to raise the target range for the federal funds rate gradually would likely be appropriate if the economy evolves about as expected. These participants commented that this gradual approach was most likely to be conducive to maintaining strong labour market conditions and achieving the symmetric 2% inflation objective on a sustained basis without resulting in conditions that would eventually require an abrupt policy tightening." The message from the minutes of last month’s FOMC meeting is clear: the Fed will continue to gradually raise official interest rates in the short term, a strategy that has proved successful thus far. Today, the Fed’s normalisation process is well underway. It involves the two primary levers of the current monetary policy framework: the policy rate and balance sheet.

Italian elections are often dismissed as an opera buffa, and this Sunday’s vote is no different. A new electorate system, the political comeback of Silvio Berlusconi and the insurgent Five Star Movement have dominated news flow. But as the eurozone’s third-largest economy prepares to go to the polls, we assess the investment landscape in Italy. Italy is no stranger to political instability. The country’s political history has been defined by short-lived governments, with 65 administrations taking the helm since World War II, each one lasting for a little more than a year on average.

The shape of the US Treasury yield curve generally contains useful information about future developments in the real economy. In particular, when the Treasury yield curve inverts – that is, when short-term rates exceed long-term yields – a recession usually follows in the next 12 months. Historically, the yield curve has been a very accurate forecasting tool: a curve inversion has preceded each of the last seven recessions in the US. The Treasury yield curve flattened significantly in 2017, and last month, the spread between 10-year yields and two-year yields narrowed to about 50bps. It is therefore possible that the spread could turn negative at some point this year. As such, it is unsurprising that market observers have become nervous about the possibility of an economic slowdown. But given the current environment of loose monetary policy, to what extent should we trust the US yield curve as a harbinger of a recession?