by winston » Tue Oct 05, 2010 8:18 am
This could be the most important story of the decade for American investors
Wall Street economists are reviving a bet that the global economy will withstand the U.S. slowdown.
Just three years since America began dragging the world into its deepest recession in seven decades, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Credit Suisse Holdings USA Inc., and BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research are forecasting that this time will be different.
Goldman Sachs predicts worldwide growth will slow 0.2 percentage point to 4.6 percent in 2011, even as expansion in the U.S. falls to 1.8 percent from 2.6 percent.
Underpinning their analysis is the view that international reliance on U.S. trade has diminished and is too small to spread the lingering effects of America's housing bust. Providing the U.S. pain doesn't roil financial markets as it did in the credit crisis, Goldman Sachs expects a weakening dollar, higher bond yields outside the U.S., and stronger emerging-market equities.
"So long as it doesn't turn to flu, the world can withstand a cold from the U.S.," Ethan Harris, head of developed-markets economic research in New York at BofA Merrill Lynch, said in a telephone interview. He predicts the U.S. will expand 1.8 percent next year, compared with 3.9 percent globally.
IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard last month predicted "positive but low growth in advanced countries," while developing nations expand at a "very high" rate. He will release revised forecasts on Oct. 6.
'Partially Decoupled'
"The world has already become partially decoupled," Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at New York's Columbia University, said in a Sept. 20 interview in Zurich. He will speak at an IMF event this week.
Emerging-Markets 'Outperformance'
The gap in growth rates between the developing and advanced worlds is widening, he said. Emerging economies will account for about 60 percent of global expansion this year and next, up from about 25 percent a decade ago, according to his estimates.
The main reason for the divergence: "Direct transmission from a U.S. slowdown to other economies through exports is just not large enough to spread a U.S. demand problem globally," Goldman Sachs economists Dominic Wilson and Stacy Carlson wrote in a Sept. 22 report entitled "If the U.S. sneezes..."
Take the so-called BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India, and China. While exports account for almost 20 percent of their gross domestic product, sales to the U.S. compose less than 5 percent of GDP, according to their estimates.
That means even if U.S. growth slowed 2 percent, the drag on these four countries would be about 0.1 percentage point, the economists reckon. Developed economies including the U.K., Germany, and Japan also have limited exposure, they said.
Room to Grow
Economies outside the U.S. have room to grow that the U.S. doesn't, partly because of its outsized slump in house prices, Wilson and Carlson said. The drop of almost 35 percent is more than twice as large as the worst declines in the rest of the Group of 10 industrial nations, they found.
The risk to the decoupling wager is a repeat of 2008, when the U.S. property bubble burst and then morphed into a global credit and banking shock that ricocheted around the world. For now, Goldman Sachs's index of U.S. financial conditions signals that bond and stock markets aren't stressed by the U.S. outlook.
Goldman Sachs isn't alone in making the case for decoupling. Harris at BofA Merrill Lynch said he didn't buy the argument prior to the financial crisis. Now he believes global growth is strong enough to offer a "handkerchief" to the U.S. as it suffers a "growth recession" of weak expansion and rising unemployment, he said.
Giving him confidence is his calculation that the U.S. share of global GDP has shrunk to about 24 percent from 31 percent in 2000. He also notes that, unlike the U.S., many countries avoided asset bubbles, kept their banking systems sound, and improved their trade and budget positions.
'Act Countercyclically'
"Emerging economies kept their powder relatively dry, and are, for the most part, in a position where they could act countercyclically if needed," the HSBC group said.
Stephen Roach, nonexecutive Asia chairman for Morgan Stanley, remains skeptical of decoupling. He links the optimism to a snapback in global trade from a record 11 percent slide in 2009. As that fades amid sluggish demand from advanced economies, emerging markets that rely on exports for strength will "face renewed and formidable headwinds," he said.
The Goldman Sachs economists argue history is on their side. The U.K., Australia, and Canada all continued growing amid the U.S. recession of 2001 as the technology-stock bust passed them by, while America's 2006-2007 housing slowdown inflicted little pain outside its borders, they said. The shift came when the latter morphed into a financial crisis, prompting Goldman Sachs to declare in December 2007 that 2008 would be the "year of recoupling."
The argument finds favor with Neal Soss, New York-based chief economist at Credit Suisse. While the supply of dollars and letters of credit that fuel international commerce dried up during the turmoil, that isn't a problem now, so the rest of the world can cope with a weaker U.S., he said.
Source: Bloomberg
It's all about "how much you made when you were right" & "how little you lost when you were wrong"
.(Trading Discipline : The Science of Constantly Acting on Knowledge Consistently - kennynah).
..................................................................<A fool gives full vent to his anger, but a wise man keeps himself under control-Proverbs 29:11>.................................................................
