Deloitte: Ignore that stink, it’s only the economy

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Via “Deloitte Access Economics Business Outlook Q4 2019: Cratered confidence weighs on growth”:

20 January 2020: Global growth is towards the lower end of the range seen since 2011. That’s not dramatically weak: growth is disappointing rather than dire. Yet the slowdown is widespread: most of the world has felt the chill of weaker growth in the past two years. And recovery still seems some way off. Despite true talks, trade tensions are entrenched, and the resultant uncertainty is having an increasingly toxic impact on confidence and investment.

Equally, global growth doesn’t seem likely to get too much worse. Although leading indicators such as global trade volumes and industrial production remain poor, they’ve stopped worsening. And service sectors remain healthy. Provided global events don’t throw yet another spanner into the works, that says this slowdown is close to its worst, and that it will have been relatively mild compared with some of the nastier downswings seen in decades past. Then again, geopolitical tensions climbed in much of the world all through 2019, and there’s an elevated chance – compared with history – that one or more of the landmines that are littering the landscape (such as tensions in the Middle East or those between India and Pakistan) end up being triggered some time in 2020 or 2021.

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About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.