From Bloomie comes Nils Smedegaard Andersen, chief executive officer at A.P. Moeller-Maersk:
“We believe that global growth is slowing down,” he said in a phone interview. “Trade is currently significantly weaker than it normally would be under the growth forecasts we see.”
“We conduct a string of our own macro-economic forecasts and we see less growth — particularly in developing nations, but perhaps also in Europe — than other people expect in 2015,” Andersen said. Also for 2016, “we’re a little bit more pessimistic than most forecasters.”
“We’re seeing some distortions amid this redistribution that’s taking place between commodity exporting countries and commodity importing countries,” he said. “But this shouldn’t lead to an outright crisis. At this point in time, there are no grounds for seeing that happening.”
That’s the Chinese rebalancing being expressed in world trade. My review remains that it will culminate in outright crisis, not specifically for China, but for emerging markets, and then fed back into developed economies, as commodity prices keep falling so far that the debt that they support turns toxic.
