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| 09-Sep-2010 21:13 |
User Research/Opinions
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%%%% WORLD ECONOMIC SUMMIT %%%%
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The roots of America’s white anxiety Study shows eight top US colleges, varsities discriminate against rural, lower-class whites ROSS DOUT HAT In March this year, Mr Pat Buchanan came to speak at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. While the assembled Ivy Leaguers accused him of homophobia and racism and anti-Semitism, he accused Harvard — and by extension, the entire American elite — of discriminating against white Christians.
Right-wing? You’re out But cultural biases seem to be at work as well. Mr Nieli highlights one of the study’s more remarkable findings: While most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organisations like high school ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances.
Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America”.
This provides statistical confirmation for what alumni of highly selective universities already know. The most under represented groups on elite campuses often are not racial minorities. They are working- class whites (and white Christians, in particular) from conservative states and regions. Inevitably, the same under-representation persists in the elite professional ranks these campuses feed into: In law and philanthropy, finance and academia, the media and the arts.
This breeds paranoia, among elite and non-elites alike. Among the white working class, increasingly the most reliable Republican constituency, alienation from the American meritocracy fuels the kind of racially-tinged conspiracy theories that Mr Beck and others have exploited — that Mr Obama is a foreign-born Marxist handpicked by a shadowy liberal cabal, that a Wall Street-Washington axis wants to flood the country with Third World immigrants, and so forth.
Among the highly-educated and liberal, meanwhile, the lack of contact with rural, working-class America generates all sorts of wild anxieties about what is being plotted in the heartland. In the George Bush years, liberals fretted about a looming evangelical theocracy. In the age of the Tea Parties, they see crypto-Klansmen and budding Timothy McVeighs everywhere they look.
This cultural divide has been widening for years, and bridging it is beyond any institution’s power. But it’s a problem admissions officers at top-tier colleges might want to keep in mind when they are assembling their freshman classes.
If such universities are trying to create an elite as diverse as the nation it inhabits, they should remember that there is more to diversity than skin colour — and that both their school and their country might be better off if they admitted a few more ROTC cadets, and a few more aspiring farmers. The New York Times The writer is an Op-Ed columnist with the New York Times and the author of Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class. A decade later, the note of white grievance that Mr Buchanan, the Reform Party’s presidential nominee in 2000, struck that night is part of the conservative melody. You can hear it when Mr Glenn Beck accuses President Barack Obama of racism, or when Mr Rush Limbaugh casts liberal policies as an exercise in “reparations”. It was sounded last year during the backlash against Ms Sonia Sotomayor’s suggestion that a “wise Latina” jurist might have advantages over a white male judge and again last week when conservatives attacked the Justice Department for supposedly going easy on members of the New Black Panther Party accused of voter intimidation. To liberals, these grievances seem at once noxious and ridiculous. (Is there any group with less to complain about, they often wonder, than white Christian Americans?) But to understand the country’s present polarisation, it is worth recognising what Mr Buchanan got right. Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Mr Thomas Espenshade and Ms Alexandria Walton Radford, published a book-length study of admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities. Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favour black and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Mr Russell K Nieli pointed out last week on the conservative website Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: The downscale, the rural and the working-class. This was particularly pronounced among the private colleges in the study. For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower class white with similar qualifications. This may be a money-saving tactic. In a footnote, Mr Espenshade and Ms Radford suggest that these institutions, conscious of their mandate to be multi-ethnic, may reserve their financial aid dollars “for students who will help them look good on their numbers of minority students”, leaving little room to admit financiallystrapped whites. |
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| 09-Sep-2010 20:59 |
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China cheat sheet helps investors survive Ben Simpfendorfer Ten years ago, China barely registered on global financial markets. Today, it is front and centre. Yet, the market’s understanding of the world’s second-largest economy has struggled to catch up. It is big, foreign and suffers from a serious lack of economic data, meaning speculation can be as important as fact.BLOOMBERG
Ben Simpfendorfer is the chief China economist at Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc in Hong Kong and the author of The New Silk Road. The opinions expressed are his own. So here are five simple points that go a long way to understanding one of the world’s most complex places: First, China doesn’t publish gross domestic product data in the same way as other countries. It publishes a growth rate but no quarterly breakdown of real demand. This is a problem. National accounts data is an economist’s most important tool. It shows how much consumers have spent on food or companies have spent building factories. It is the breakdown that helps us understand if the composition of growth is healthy or reliant on only a few sources of demand. In the case of China, there is a risk the country is spending too much on building highways and factories, resulting in overcapacity and bad debts. And since there is no reliable quarterly data on such investment spending, it is hard to understand whether last year’s rocket-fuelled recovery has only worsened imbalances. So when third-quarter growth figures are released early next month, it’s worth attaching a health warning to the report. Second, food almost always explains surprise changes in the consumer price index. Part of the problem is that the average Chinese household is more likely to purchase fresh food to be cooked at home. By contrast, in neighbouring Hong Kong, food eaten in restaurants accounts for half of the food sub-index, so labour and rental costs help to damp the impact of a sudden increase in the prices of fresh food. Not so in China, where the prices of fresh pork alone, for instance, can visibly shift the CPI. The upshot is that the country’s weather patterns, rather than its economic cycle, are arguably more important in forecasting the CPI. Third, China’s domestic demand provides less support to the global economy than popularly believed. Its imports have surged in the past decade but it’s important to understand what exactly it is buying. About a third of imports are destined for the re-export trade. Chinese factories buy semi-conductors and mother boards from producers in Singapore and Taiwan, for instance, assembling them into notebook personal computers and then shipping the finished goods to retail shops in the United States and Europe. Almost another third is commodities. China accounts for much of the world’s demand for many raw materials and is the main buyer of iron ore. Its commodity imports benefit countries such as Australia, Brazil, Chile and South Africa, even as this trade inflates prices for other importers. The final third is made up of goods such as turbines from Germany, excavators from Japan and aircraft from the US. These are the real drivers of global growth. Yet, such imports were valued at only US$430 billion ($580 billion) last year. To put that into perspective, South Korea’s imports were worth US$320 billion in the same year. Fourth, China is big but poor. Its per capita GDP is US$6,600, as measured by purchasing power parity. Yet, this still ranks China alongside Algeria and Namibia in terms of wealth. Moreover, much of the country’s growth has so far benefited companies, rather than households. That’s one of the downsides of a low-cost business model. It’s no surprise then that the government is now aggressively trying to address these imbalances, by lifting minimum wages and improving working conditions. The focus on raising wages and preventing job losses is one reason China has yet to revalue its currency, as critics have demanded, and why it is likely to resist such calls in the future. Fifth, structural growth drivers are as important as cyclical ones. The liberalisation of China’s housing industry in 1998, for instance, explains much of the country’s surging growth. Until then, the state provided most of the housing stock. But reforms allowed households to buy bigger and better homes, and property developers built them. It might be that the structural drivers are now being overwhelmed by cyclical ones and that China is experiencing a housing bubble no different from those of the United Kingdom and US. If so, the bears will soon be proven right as the bubble bursts and China’s decade-long boom will be brought to a screeching halt. But if the bears are proven wrong, it will be because of the emergence of new structural drivers. Urbanisation is one such driver. Some analysts say China’s urban population will grow by 15 million people annually over the next 10 years, implying an extra 5 million apartments annually. Services are another. China’s manufacturing is still the largest driver of growth but there are the early signs of an emerging services sector, from car rental to cinema multiplexes. These five points are by no way exhaustive. But China is unusual compared with many of the world’s largest economies, perhaps because of the country’s status as a developing, Asian, or formerly planned economy. The usual set of analytical tools won’t always apply, however tempting it is to do so. |
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| 09-Sep-2010 20:47 |
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There was hope of some action by Prime Minister Naoto Kan and Bank of Japan Governor Masaaki Shirakawa on economic policy but nothing happened ... Disappointment over token efforts resulted in exactly what Japan didn’t want: An even stronger yen, which has gone from 85.2 to the greenback on Aug 23 to 84.1 on Aug 31. |
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| 09-Sep-2010 20:44 |
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Crying wolf has its price Will iam Pesek It's the economy that cried wolf.
THE PRICE OF AVERSION Here are three specific things to consider about Japan’s plight. One, the price of Japan’s aversion to change is going up.
After the boom-and-bust 1980s, it should have rid banks of bad loans, deregulated industry, made tax policies more pro-business, raised productivity, and encouraged entrepreneurship. If Japan had done all these things, it would have a much better balanced economy today and the yen’s value wouldn’t matter nearly so much.
Instead, Japan opted for Band-Aids like massive government spending, low interest rates and a weaker yen.
Exchange rates became a particular obsession in the 2000s as Japan focused on its export behemoths to maintain a trade surplus, the only strategy the government knew how to pursue. To their great surprise, Japanese policymakers discovered that the currencies of nations that export more than they import go up — especially in crisis-wracked times, when investors seek safety.
Now, thanks to the glacial pace of change, Japan’s relevance globally is waning.
China’s economy officially surpassed Japan’s in size in August.
The moral of this story? “Don’t cry about the strong yen; fix the problem,” says Ms Naomi Fink, strategist at Bank of Tokyo — Mitsubishi UFJ in Tokyo. OVERWHELMED BY GLOBAL FORCES Second, Japan is being overwhelmed by international forces.
At play are global trends far beyond the reach of bureaucrats in Tokyo.
Yet its post-war business model worked so brilliantly that the corporate elite, even to this day, is reluctant to change.
Ditto for a government that remains wary of immigration and empowering women to offset a rapidly ageing workforce.
This delicately calibrated status quo is getting harder to maintain with each passing day. Trade surplus aside, there’s little economic justification for the yen’s 28 per cent jump against the dollar since Sept 1, 2008.
Japan didn’t fix its leaky roofs when the sun was shining prior to the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers.
Now that the world economy is raining bad news, it’s paying the price. So are the nation’s 126 million people and investors who bought into a revival that was more hype than reality. POLITICAL PARALYSIS The third point is that political paralysis is taking its toll.
There’s a reason currency traders aren’t living in fear that the Bank of Japan will sell yen: The nation’s policy-making apparatus is more uncoordinated than ever.
Part of the problem is that Japan can’t seem to hang on to a leader: Should a Sept 14 election go badly for Mr Kan, Japan could have its sixth prime minister in three years.
“Twenty years after the bursting of the bubble, it would be nice if we had, if not a plan, at least a sense of urgency,” says Mr Nicholas Smith, director of equity research at MF Global FXA Securities in Tokyo.
“And a leader that stayed long enough for the outside world to learn his name.”
This leadership vacuum feeds deflation.
In July, consumer prices excluding fresh food fell for a 17th consecutive month.
The smartest way to persuade consumers to save less and spend more is to convince them the future is bright. That goes for businesses, too.
Such optimism is in short supply.
Mr Suzuki, for one, is speaking out with greater frequency — and greater pessimism — these days.
“I want Tokyo to hear our wailing,” he says. Oh, policymakers do. It’s just that they have been doing their own fair share of crying — even as the world passes Japan by. William Pesek is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. With growth slowing, deflation deepening and the yen inexplicably surging in late August, Japanese policymakers pledged bold action. Bank of Japan Governor Masaaki Shirakawa rushed home to deal with the emergency. Investors braced for aggressive currency intervention. The media mobilised on Aug 30 to cover Prime Minister Naoto Kan unveiling a fat stimulus package to counter the export-crimping effects of a strong yen. And then — nothing. Disappointment over token efforts resulted in exactly what Japan didn’t want: An even stronger yen, which has gone from 85.2 to the greenback on Aug 23 to 84.1 on Aug 31. Suzuki Motor chairman Osamu Suzuki, who has built a big export business for his company’s sturdy little cars, speaks for many when he says of the currency: “I spend every day feeling anxious about this.” So do politicians in Tokyo. That they are at a loss to do anything about it has Japan suffering the same fate as Aesop’s boy who warned of crisis so often that no one took him seriously anymore. As the dollar and euro slide, the yen rises by default. Rarely before has it been so difficult for Japan to control its currency — yet the yen is the national problem that policy makers, Japanese executives and ordinary Japanese obsess about the most. The yen’s jump to a 15-year high says much about where Japan finds itself in 2010 and that’s not a good place. |
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| 09-Sep-2010 20:27 |
All-S Equities Prop
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[][][]PROPERTY[][][] City Dev+ CapitaLand+ KepLand
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A $2 million dream ... Landed property within reach if buyers know where to look Ephraim Seow ephraimseow@mediacorp.com.sg SINGAPORE Those who are serious about purchasing a landed property should start with $2 million as a realistic budget to work with, property experts said. “A year ago, especially in the earlier part when the downturn was at its worst, you might still be able to afford a semi-detached house in prime areas for under $2 million. Now, this is a lot harder,” said ERA Asia-Pacific associate director Eugene Lim. Instead, those with $2 million budget can now opt for 10 to 15 year-old inter-terrace houses, defined as those within a row of terrace houses. Such properties offer ample space with land areas of between 1,500 and 1,600 sq ft, as well as a built-up area of close to 2,000 sq ft. “These will not come with facilities like swimming pools but buyers can make up for it through a country club membership. It can be a good trade off since they don’t have to maintain the facilities,” said Mr William Wong, managing director at RealStar Premier Property. Of the 259 freehold landed properties sold for less than $2 million from January to August this year, 247 were terrace houses, 11 were semi-detached houses and one was a detached house, according to data from the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA). In comparison, around 31 semi-detached houses and 2 detached houses were bought during the same period last year. Market experts said that as a guide, terrace houses located in the central region would cost some $2 million to $2.6 million, a semi-detached house would cost above $3 million and a bungalow would be more than $5 million. But if buyers look east, they may find some good buys. “If the buyer is flexible with the location, they can afford a corner terrace house in the East. These would have more space for landscaping,” said Mr Lim. At under $2 million, some terrace houses in the East offer a land area of 1,600 sq ft to 1,700 sq ft, property market observers said. These will have built-up areas of 2,000 to 2,500 sq ft, able to accommodate three large bedrooms or four smaller ones. And if the buyer is fine with a 99-year lease, they could also opt for terrace house at $1.3 million or a semi-detached house for $1.6 million to $ 1.8 million, said Mr Lim. For instance, a terrace house at 17 Sea Breeze Road in Tampines was sold at $1.8 million, which works out to $503 psf. Built in 1993, the property has an area of about 3,574 sq ft. Another recent transaction was for the semi-detached house at 157 Bedok Road, sold at $833,333 or about $259 psf. It 3,218 sq ft unit was built in 2004. Property experts said with the recent cooling measures, buyers may be able to pick up good deals as sellers may become more amenable to negotiation. — With property prices hovering near record highs, can some home buyers still realise their dream of owning a landed property? |
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| 09-Sep-2010 20:17 |
All-S Equities Prop
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[][][]PROPERTY[][][] City Dev+ CapitaLand+ KepLand
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This mining town is more expensive than Sydney Prospective buyers shout ‘bingo’ when allocated a block of land by lottery KARRATHA Now he and his 40 employees cannot build homes quickly enough in the remote Western Australian mining town where demand for land is so hot that the government organises lotteries to select buyers. “During ballots people would literally yell out ‘bingo’ if they got a block of land because instantly they knew they had made A$100,000 ($122,400),” Mr Eaton, 43, said as he monitored workers at a building site in the town of 20,000 people. “They would build a house on it and their profit would go up to A$250,000,” he added. The housing shortage in a region that’s one of the world’s biggest suppliers of iron ore and natural gas is driving up costs for resource companies such as Chevron Corp and BHP Billiton as they mine raw materials to feed China’s industrialisation. Chevron, the second-largest American oil company, was forced to lease a seven year-old cruise liner, the Karratha means “good country” in the language of the local indigenous people. It is the biggest town in the arid northwestern region of the Pilbara and has a median house price of A$775,000, 49 percent higher than Sydney’s. A four-bedroom home in the fly-ridden, cyclone-prone outpost rents for about A$10,000 a month — triple the average apartment in Manhattan. (Western Australia) — Property developer Paul Eaton moved to Karratha 10 years ago with a fledgling business.MS Finnmarken, to house 350 workers at its A$43 billion Gorgon gas project.MINING CENTRE The Pilbara, a region 20-per-cent bigger than California with only 45,000 people, generates 23 per cent of Australia’s merchandise exports. Karratha, about 1,500km north of the state’s capital Perth, is one of the world’s remotest locales, making homes twice as costly to build as in the nation’s major cities, as each brick, roof-tile and sheet of plasterboard must be shipped thousands of kilometres. The other main town in the region is Port Hedland, the centre of BHP and Rio Tinto Group’s iron ore operations. Like Karratha, its property prices are booming, giving it a mean housing price of A$908,000, according to Real Estate Institute of Western Australia figures. That compares to A$520,000 in Sydney, according to property researcher RP Data. “The region has gone ballistic,” said Ms Dianne Gilleland, regional manager at the Master Builders Association. “Logistically, it’s very expensive to build houses in the Pilbara. Tradesmen don’t have anywhere to stay. There are a few caravan parks; hotels charge whatever they like. To even book into a hotel is tough. Prices will rise for a long time.” FLY IN, FLY OUT workers The mining and energy companies house most of their staff — known as “fly in, fly out” workers as they reside in cities such as Perth and Sydney when not on-site — in permanent self-contained units known as Dongas. Due to a shortage of these, other companies are forced to rent hotels or houses. That is bad news for the towns’ non-resources workers, who earn about a third of the miners’ wages. “Some people who have lived in Karratha and Port Hedland all their lives working in low- to moderate-income jobs can’t afford to live there anymore,” said Ms Bronwyn Kitching, chief executive officer of Shelter WA, a non-government organisation dedicated to improving housing opportunities for lower- and middle income workers in the state. Other workers, especially in the service industries, cannot afford their own rooms and are forced into “hot-bedding”, where they pay rent for a bed that is taken by another worker as soon as they wake up, she said. PLAYING CATCH-UP Western Australia Premier Colin Barnett, who labels his state “the Saudi Arabia of natural gas”, is aware of the problem. His government is planning to turn Karratha and Port Hedland into sustainable cities with populations of about 50,000 by 2035, complete with new marinas and shopping centres. “We have a Catch-22 situation where we need housing but the people that build the houses can’t afford to live here,”said Mr Chris Adams, general manager of the government’s new Pilbara Cities initiative. “There is massive demand for housing and community facilities and the supply is just not there. We’re fixing up the supply end but at the same time demand keeps growing. We’re always playing catch up.” INHOSPITABLE CLIMATE The Pilbara — named after pilbarra, an aboriginal word for mullet — is the main resource centre of Western Australia, a state about four times the size of France that accounts for 62 per cent of the nation’s mineral production, 75 per cent of natural gas and 64 per cent of crude oil and condensate, according to state government figures. Mining and petroleum production in the state was worth more than A$60 billion last year and the state has about A$170 billion worth of projects in the investment pipeline over the next five years. The Gorgon project on Barrow Island, off Karratha, holds more than 40 trillion cubic feet of gas and will supply 8 per cent of current global liquefied natural gas capacity, Chevron said last year. It is the company’s largest project. The LNG that Gorgon will produce will help elevate Australia to second among global suppliers of the fuel from sixth now, according to BP. CYCLONES, LAND CLAIMS Visitors to Karratha, which arose from the arid moonscape and scrub terrain less than a half-century ago, would be forgiven for thinking it an unlikely place for a housing boom. Temperatures often soar above 40°C in the summer. Cyclones buffer the region from November to April, further adding to building costs as homes must be made cyclone-proof. Meanwhile, land releases are constrained due to claims by the region’s aboriginal population and reticence to allocate land to housing when it may have minerals underneath. All of that adds up to a “perfect storm” constraining the supply of new homes, according to Karratha real estate agent Phil Hodnett. Properties that 10 years ago were selling for A$160,000 are now approaching A$1 million, he said. “The world wants more and more of what we have here in terms of natural resources and every other day there’s new stuff found,” he said. “The game just keeps going on.” BloombergThe mining boom which has hit Western Australia has created an unprecedented shortage of accommodation in Karratha and the surrounding area, resulting in home prices that are 49-per-cent higher than Sydney’s. AFPProperties that 10 years ago were selling for A$160,000 are now approaching A$1 million, said Karratha real estate agent Phil Hodnett. |
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| 09-Sep-2010 19:56 |
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~~~~ CORPORATE GOVERNANCE ~~~~
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We need commitment for long run From Singapore society’s point of view, I think it is only fair that PRs, after a certain period of time, should become Singapore citizens or lose their PR status. For a PR to spend 20 to 30 years earning money in Singapore, and then go back to their hometown to retire (and spend the money earned in Singapore), it does no justice to Singapore’s economy in the future. For every 1 million PRs that retire elsewhere, assuming their savings range between $10,000 and $100,000 per person, we are looking at a potential opportunity cost of at least $10 billion to $100 billion that could have helped stimulate the domestic economy. Singapore can only count on committed citizens to face the future. PRs who don’t want to commit to Singapore, in my opinion, are no loss anyway in the long run. Current benefits PRs enjoy should only go to those prepared to be committed to Singapore’s economic future (it’s called bang for the buck). Posted on Todayonline .com |
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| 09-Sep-2010 19:50 |
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Not the bIg stIck again Letter from Soh Gim Chuan I REFER to the report “A good idea, or maybe not...” (Sept 8). Forcing a person to take up citizenship under threat of withdrawalvery bad idea. of permanent residency is a It reinforces the perception that the Government tries to solve problems with a big stick. Taking up citizenship involves more than just economic cost-benefit analysis. Would, say, a Georgian sever ties with his country and take up Singapore citizenship when he cannot find a Georgian community here? |
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| 09-Sep-2010 19:45 |
User Research/Opinions
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~~~~ CORPORATE GOVERNANCE ~~~~
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Difficult ties that bind Loyal to Singapore, but will never be Singaporean Letter from Peter Wadeley I WAS very surprised to hear that some permanent residents may be asked in the future to become citizens or else their PR status may not be renewed. I live in Singapore because I have a Singaporean wife and two Singaporean children. But for my wife, I would never have come to Singapore. We are not a burden to society, and my wife and I have produced two intelligent children. Our children are encouraged to have as much understanding of the Chinese language and culture as of the English language and Western culture. I am already preparing my son to do National Service (which is many years away). Singapore is my home and I feel loyalty to Singapore. But I am not Singaporean and never will be. Although I feel more immediate connection to Singapore than the country of my birth and citizenship, I simply do not feel Singaporean. Nothing will ever change that. I sincerely hope that such a policy is not implemented. |
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| 09-Sep-2010 19:34 |
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%%%% WORLD ECONOMIC SUMMIT %%%%
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Has the US economy stalled? With the pall cast over Q2 and Q3’s slow growth, it may not take much to tip the economy into a double dip Keith Wade FEARS of a double dip remain high with the Federal Reserve downgrading its assessment of the United States economy this month. Interest rate expectations have fallen again with US Treasury yields falling sharply and the curve experiencing a bull flattening. Lower rates and flatter curves are normally associated with weaker growth, but equity markets continue to ignore the message from the bond market. Instead, risk assets have rallied over the past month with equities, credit and commodities performing strongly. Furthermore, performance within these asset classes has been led by the more cyclical industrial and material sectors, with emerging markets leading the regions. The stand-off between equity and bond investors continues. Our macro view of no double dip suggests that equity investors will eventually win this debate, but the Fed’s assessment and a run of disappointing figures (including another weak payroll) mean that the pendulum has swung in favour of the “double dippers” once more this month. We gave our reasons for not expecting a double dip last month, as we see the economy being supported by increased corporate spending. Strong profit growth and healthy cash flows indicate that firms will raise capital expenditures and employment in the coming months. Meanwhile, although still fragile, the household sector has already been through a considerable period of retrenchment, raising its savings ratio to the highest level for more than a decade in the US and United Kingdom. THE MID-YEAR SOFT PATCH More recently, the gloom has been increased by the news that the US economy was even weaker than previously expected in Q2. Economists now expect growth during Q2 to be revised down to 1.5 per cent annualised from an original estimate 2.4 per cent. Although this may sound like ancient history, it adds to the perception that the US economy has stalled and is vulnerable to the slightest shock which might reduce demand. So far, the third quarter is not looking any better and with growth at such a minimal level, it would not take much to tip us into the double dip. LOOKING BACK Periods where a recovery has appeared to stall are not uncommon. Looking at the last two US recoveries, in the early 90s and 2000s, both saw GDP growth drop below 2.5 per cent annualised after the recession had ended. Both were periods where the outlook was seen as “uncertain” by the Fed. In each case the Fed eased, bond yields fell and the economy bounced back. This illustrates how even a normal recovery can be vulnerable to bouts of weakness once the inventory cycle has run its course. The current recovery is all the more likely to suffer, given the de-leveraging headwinds on activity. It also highlights a key difference today: Monetary policy was effective in supporting the recovery in the early 90s and 2000s, whereas today there are doubts about its potency given the de-leveraging of balance sheets. That does not mean that the Fed will not try to do something. Although we do not expect an outright double dip, growth could well be slow enough to prompt a reaction and we would not rule out further quantitative easing (QE) in the US in the coming months. We do not believe that it would have much effect on the economy, but the Fed will want to be seen to be responding. The impact on the financial markets could be quite powerful, however. In addition to QE, we would also watch for the announcement of further stimulus from the administration ahead of the mid-term elections in November. LOOKING AHEAD Next month, we will review our forecasts for global growth and inflation. At this stage it is likely that we will have to trim our US GDP forecasts to reflect the weaker performance of the economy around mid-year. However, forecasts for Europe are likely to be less affected given the recent improvement in indicators. Interest rate rises are likely to be delayed until late next year. The writer is Chief Economist and Strategist at Schroders. |
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| 09-Sep-2010 19:18 |
Genting Sing
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GenSp starts to move up again
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today's lOw S$1.790 BBs already dId that in the mOrnIng.
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| 09-Sep-2010 19:15 |
GentingSMBeCW130603
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GENTiNG SMBLeCW 130603 Expiring 2013
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| 09-Sep-2010 18:57 |
GentingSMBeCW120402
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J2UW Genting SP Covered Warrant Expirty 2 Apr 2012
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| 09-Sep-2010 18:52 |
GentingSMBeCW130103
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GENTING SMBLeCW130103 Expiry 2012 December
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| 09-Sep-2010 18:51 |
Genting Sing
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GenSp starts to move up again
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| 09-Sep-2010 18:49 |
Genting HK USD
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Genting HK US$
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| 09-Sep-2010 18:48 |
User Research/Opinions
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/\/\/\/ stOck pIcks & stOck cAll /\/\/\/\/\/
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| 09-Sep-2010 18:37 |
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/\/\/\/ stOck pIcks & stOck cAll /\/\/\/\/\/
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| 09-Sep-2010 18:35 |
User Research/Opinions
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Best stock picking related to holding time horizon
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| 09-Sep-2010 18:32 |
Genting HK USD
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Genting HK US$
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