MacroScope

Britain’s Olympic and Paralympic teams may have brought home more medals than organisers had dreamed possible but the Games themselves have probably failed to lift the economy as much as the government had hoped.

The country’s gross domestic product will grow 0.6 percent in the current quarter, according to the latest Reuters poll, revised down from a 0.7 percent prediction in an August poll.

That is enough to drag Britain out of its second recession in four years but most of the bounceback is from an extra working day and better weather in the quarter.

“The Olympics’ actual effect will only be small,” said James Knightley at ING Financial Markets.

Before the sporting extravaganza kicked off, Britain’s government touted the Olympics as a historic opportunity to showcase UK business and tourism.

Henrique Meirelles, Brazil’s highly rated central bank president, gave unusual insight into current thinking at the International Olympic Committee in a speech in Oxford the other night.

Diverging from his main theme on Brazil’s remarkable journey from economic basket case to emerging market superpower, Meirelles said that he had gone to Copenhagen last month as part of Rio de Janeiro’s successful bid for the 2016 Olympics. The reason: The IOC asked him to come.

Meirelles said that the IOC knew that Brazil currently had all the conditions needed to host the Games, but wanted to know about how predictable it was that this would carry through over the next seven years. “They wanted to know what is really happening,” he said.